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2017 Kickstart locations announced

The locations for Student Robotics 2017 Kickstart have been announced.

Kickstart is the event which kicks off a competition year, where the game will be announced and robotics kits will be handed out to the teams. This year the kickstart event will be on the 15th of October 2016.

The venues for Student Robotics 2017 kickstart are:

Select your kickstart from the above list for more information. If students want to take part, but haven’t already signed up to compete, they can join the waiting list by starting a team.

Student Robotics 2016 sees RGS Guildford take victory

All the teams from this year's competition
All the teams from this year's competition
This year's winners, RGS Guildford, holding their trophy and their robot
This year's winners, RGS Guildford, holding their trophy and their robot

‘RGS Guildford’ from Royal Grammar School Guildford took 1st place at this year’s Student Robotics tournament, held at Newbury Racecourse. In a tense final, their robot beat The Ladies’ College, ‘Team GRD2’ from Gordano School, ‘Where’s Me Jumper?’ from Brockenhurst College and more than 40 other teams from around the UK and Germany to take victory.

RGS Guildford's winning robot
RGS Guildford's winning robot

This year’s competition was streamed live from 4 different cameras around the arenas. The recording of the stream of the league matches, and for the knockouts are available on YouTube.

The challenge: Sunny Side Up

For this year’s game, the competitors had to build and program robots to turn tokens so that their side faces upwards. Additional points could be scored by moving suitable turned tokens into the robots’ corner zone. Full details can be found in the rulebook.

This presented an especially difficult challenge; to score well, teams had to program their robots to decide which way to rotate their cubes based on their orientation. It was also a difficult challenge mechanically, as teams had to engineer a robust way to rotate their cubes.

The 2016 arena layout
The 2016 arena layout

The standard of robots was high this year, with some very advanced robots and a variety of approaches for flipping cubes. Whether it was vacuum pumps, a turntable, or even just a stick pointing out of the front of the robot, almost all of the robots were interesting and well designed. Some highlights were:

Prizes

Winning the knockout is not the only prize-worthy achievement at Student Robotics. A complete list of awards are shown below.

Prize Team
1st Place ‘RGS Guildford’ from Royal Grammar School Guildford
2nd Place The Ladies’ College
3rd Place ‘Team GRD2’ from Gordano School
Committee Award TWGSBrobotics’ from Tunbridge Wells Grammar School for Boys
Rookie Award The Ladies’ College
Robot and Team Image Measure, Analyze, Improve’ from Gymnasium Markt Indersdorf
Online Presence Team QMC’ from Queen Mary’s College

The Committee Award, given for an elegant and well made solution to this year’s challenge, was awarded to Tunbridge Wells Grammar School for Boys, for their design made out of beautifully-machined wood.

The team from The Ladies' College holding their robot and being presented their second prize, the Rookie award
The team from The Ladies' College holding their robot and being presented their second prize, the Rookie award

The Rookie Award is for the rookie team who performed best in the league. Considering the team from The Ladies’ College managed to achieve 2nd place overall, they very much deserved the award.

The team from Gymnasium Markt Indersdorf, winners of the Robot and Team Image award
The team from Gymnasium Markt Indersdorf, winners of the Robot and Team Image award

The Robot and Team Image prize is for the team which present themselves and their robot in the most outstanding manner. This year the prize went to the team from ‘Measure, Analyze, Improve’ from Gymnasium Markt Indersdorf, who came all the way from Germany looking very Frankenstein-esque, wearing their bio-hazard suits and zombie face paints. Their robot was a rotten-fleshy-green colour with a brain exposed.

The Online Presence award is given to the team with the best website, social media presence, or combination of the two. This year it was awarded to ‘Team QMC’ from Queen Mary’s College for their entertaining regular updates on their blog and their relentless interaction on twitter.

For official details of what the awards are, please see the rulebook.

The teams

44 teams made it to the competition this year, 6 of whom came from schools or colleges which had not competed before.

Student Robotics 2017 promises to be bigger than ever! If you’d like to compete, see Compete page for more information. Start talking to your teachers and recruiting team members as soon as possible!

The Student Robotics Team

Notes to editors

Student Robotics is an annual robotics competition for 16-18 year-olds in the UK and Europe. It was founded in 2006 by university students and is free to enter thanks to our sponsors and many volunteers. Since it was first run in 2008, the final competition has grown from one room at the University of Southampton1 to the UK’s biggest autonomous robotics competition; a two-day event for more than 50 teams and over 400 students.

At the start of the academic year, teams are given a kit containing custom-made electronics at a Kickstart event, where the game for the year is announced. They then have until the end of the Easter holiday to build fully-autonomous robots which will compete against each other in the final competition. They are supported by volunteer mentors, and software to assist them in programming their robots is provided.

High resolution photographs of the event will be uploaded to the Flickr group. If you would like to find out more, please get in touch.

  1. Student Robotics is independent from the University of Southampton. 

Competition dates for SR2016 announced

The competition venue and dates for SR2016 have now been confirmed. Once again the competition will return to the Newbury Racecourse Grandstand which has successfully hosted the competition over the past two years.

The competition weekend will be the 30th April and 1st May. Over the two day event the teams’ robots will first compete in a series of league matches, during which they will continue to improve their hardware and software. These matches will then seed a knockout to choose the overall winners.

In each match the robots will play Sunny Side Up, in which the aim is to turn as many of the nine tokens the right way up and then collect as many as they can into their home zone.

In addition to the coveted 1st, 2nd and 3rd prizes, there are awards for the highest placed new team, the most ingenious robot and the best presented team among others. For full details of the rules of the game and the prizes available see the rulebook.

Whether you’re supporting a team or just want to watch, the competition is open to everyone over the whole weekend. We particularly recommend coming along for the finals on Sunday afternoon.