The Student Robotics 2014 competition is now under way. This year we have three hundred students registered, across fifty four schools, and three different countries. They now have six months to design, prototype and build their robots, to take part in this years competition game. You can find more information about the people taking part on their team pages.
The Kickstart event was spread over three different locations, at the Universities of Southampton and Bristol, and Greshams School in Norfolk. Attending teams received their electronics kit, an introduction to SR and exercised their robot building skills through a series of tasks demonstrating the range of functions that our electronics kit provides.
This year our kit has new motor controllers, allowing our teams to use twice as many motors as in previous years. We’ve also included a ruggeduino as part of each kit. As well as performing basic input and output, the ruggeduino can be reprogrammed by teams to have more advanced, custom functionality. We’ve also kept all of our past features, such as the servo controller and vision system.
This year’s game, Slots, challenges teams to collect 20cm boxes from the arena, rotate them and place them into central zones, with bonuses for placing them in the adjacent slots. During the competition teams have three minutes to place as many boxes as possible, competing against three other robots at a time.
After a league and knockout stage, the best robot will be crowned the SR2014 champion! Full details are available in the rules.
We’re hoping that this years competition will produce the most innovative and exciting robots that we’ve ever seen during Student Robotics, and are looking forward to seeing how they perform at the Competition.