National Placing For College Robotics Team
National Placing For College Robotics Team
September 15, 2014 at 7:38 AM
After great success at the Auckland Robocup competition, our first place winners from the various categories travelled to Dunedin to compete against the best robotics teams from around the country in the National Robocup Competition this weekend. Some of our students could be spotted on TV1 news on Saturday night!
Each of our teams had built different robots to enter the various categories of the competition, applying their engineering knowledge and skills. They not only built robots that could perform the required tasks but also created the programming to precisely control the robot completely autonomously; any modifications to the robots meant altering the computer programme to suit the sensors.
In the ‘Soccer’ competition, two robots need to work together to protect the goal, attack the opposition, gain the ball and score across the field.
In the various ‘Rescue’ competitions, students were given only 20 minutes from first seeing the task to writing a programme that set their own robot on a path to complete a course over various obstacles to find an object and then ‘rescue it’ by pushing it out of the course.
The Premier teams had a more difficult ‘Rescue’ challenge. After completing the course, the robot had to find an object and pick it up to deliver to a platform.
In Dunedin there were 45 teams competing across the various categories. There were some extremely clever and precise robots in the Premier categories, which we were unable to beat, but Alex Monk and Connor Mattson still maintained 3rd place. The soccer team of Alex Smith, William Ning and Oscar Simms, despite leading the goal scores in the heats, ended with 3rd place also. In the Senior Rescue, Callum Lee and Andrew Chen also placed 3rd. It was the team comprising Desmond Yong, Nicholas Scott and Daniel Mar that had the greatest success for the College winning 1st place.
Our boys have returned to Auckland well pleased with their three 3rd places and an outright win and having seen the level of robotics from other schools, are now fired up to do even better next year!
Well done boys, a great effort!
