Kajima became the first in the construction industry to sponsor the NHK College Student ROBOCON 2024: Qualification Round for the ABU Asia-Pacific ROBOCON (NHK College Student ROBOCON 2024). In this qualification round, which took place at Nihon Kogakuin Arena (Ota-ku, Tokyo) on June 9, 2024, a total of 18 teams of university and technical college students who had passed the preliminary screening used robots that they had created by making the most of their ideas based on a given competition theme to compete with each other for technological and creative excellence and had a heated competition.

The competition theme was “Harvest Day.” As the ABU Asia-Pacific Robot Contest 2024 Quảng Ninh, Vietnam (ABU ROBOCON, of which Kajima is a sponsor) was to be held in Vietnam, the theme was inspired by rice cultivation on Vietnamese terraced fields. The teams competed in tasks that depicted various stages of rice cultivation, from planting rice seedlings to harvesting and transporting the harvested grains to a warehouse. Kajima not only put up a message in the venue to cheer up contestants, saying, “Give shape to your ideas! Make your dreams realities!” but also set up a booth to introduce its “smart agriculture” initiatives in association with the competition theme, including efforts to improve productivity on terraced fields, as well as examples of applications of robots at construction sites.

At the awards ceremony following the competition, Kajima presented a special prize to the Niigata University team, which operated a robot that demonstrated outstanding planting performance. The winner was the Toyohashi University of Technology team, which had won the competition for the third consecutive time and qualified to participate in the international competition ABU ROBOCON in August 2024 as the Japanese national team.