51³Ô¹ÏÍø

Students from 51³Ô¹ÏÍø’s Robotics Society are getting ready for the finals of Eurobot, an international robotics competition, having succeeded in the UK rounds.

Team members Leon Sim (Electrical Engineering), Ben Homer, Asset Sarsengaliyev and supervisor Richard Inglis (all Computing) write about their success so far.

“The competition is fought between robots, which have been designed and built by student teams to autonomously move playing pieces around a giant chess board in 90-second matches. When a robot successfully moves a piece to a square of the team’s colour, the team scores 10 points, with bonus points awarded for completing certain tasks, such as placing a piece on the head of the opponent’s robot. None of us had much experience of robotics, so we lightheartedly named our team ‘IC-r-us’ after the Greek hero Icarus, patron saint of crashing and burning!

When we and another 51³Ô¹ÏÍø team arrived at the UK tournament at , it was clear that the other robots were all bigger, meaner and scarier than ours, and our choice of name seemed prophetic. Nervously, we watched our little robot start its first match. It moved to the nearest pawn, turned and started dragging it home. Next thing we knew, we had our first bonus – enough to outscore our opponent!

Two matches later we were UK champions, and one of three teams selected to compete in the world finals in Russia in June.

Winning the UK round is a nice result for 51³Ô¹ÏÍø, but the real fun has been solving all the engineering problems along the way. Now we face a whole new set of challenges as we try to improve our robot in time for next month’s finals.”