A robot’s ability to move is strongly linked to its ability to amaze. Student Robotics is all about encouraging young people to build amazing robots, and so our volunteers work hard to deliver tools and guidance for getting robots moving. That’s why, for SR2014, we’re significantly improving the motor controllers that we provide to our teams.

The design and manufacture of the new motor controller has been lead by Richard Barlow. It builds upon our last 7 years of experience in developing robust electronics suitable for use in schools. Every one of SR2014’s 54 teams will receive two of our new USB motor controllers, each of which is capable of driving two DC motors.

With the growing size of Student Robotics, changing a single part of our kit is not a small undertaking. Yesterday evening, students from Headington School in Oxford along with several volunteers from the area, assisted Richard in assembling 180 plastic cases from laser-cut parts for our new stash of motor boards.

SR2014 is to be the largest Student Robotics undertaking so far, and our volunteers have been hard at work for the last few months preparing for its Kickstart, which is now less than two weeks away. On the 12th of October, 54 teams from the UK, France, and Germany will receive their challenge from Student Robotics. Along with this challenge, the teams will be provided with a set of electronic parts which will form the foundation of their robots. With this kit, and the hard work of our teams, we’re looking forwards to seeing some amazing things transpire at the SR2014 competition in April.

Today we opened up registration for the current iteration of our competition, SR2014. The rules for the game the robots will play will be announced at our Kickstart event at the beginning of October. Teams will then have just over six months to construct their robots before the competition in April 2014.

If you have a team of 16-18 year-olds that you would like to enter for the competition, please fill out this interest form and we will get in touch with you as soon as we can. Thanks to our sponsors, we can accept even more teams for this year’s competition.

Student Robotics is over for another year! After almost six months of work by thirty-two teams came a final weekend of frantic building, coding and pizza consumption. Oh, and the small matter of a 102-match league tournament topped with a knockout competition to decide the winner, which needed a tie-breaker to resolve!

This year’s game was called “A Strange Game”. To score points, a robot had to claim squares of a 3x3 grid by placing more tokens in them than its opponents, or by lifting one of its tokens onto a pedestal. Score multipliers were applied for claiming a row or column.

The main mechanisms for transporting tokens were grabbing arms and suction cups. Many robots focused on getting tokens into the square right in front of them. Several tokens were successfully placed on pedestals; team Gymnasium Markt Indersdorf, from Munich, managed to get four tokens onto separate pedestals during one match. Amongst the competing robots were a hovercraft, a cow, a stag beetle, WALL·E and Superman.

The final was a very close game, which ended with a three way tie. It was quickly decided that a tie breaker match had to occur between Clifton High School, Gymnasium Markt Indersdorf and Queen Mary’s College.

The tie breaker was also a very, very close game. Clifton High claimed their closest zone before getting stuck; meanwhile Markt Indersdorf and QMC were having a pedestal race. Markt Indersdorf managed to miss their second pedestal, knocked the token into the zone they’d already claimed and became stuck, while QMC managed to successfully claim their second pedestal. However Gymnasium Markt Indersdorf’s robot had not given up, and managed to get a token and line up for its third attempt at claiming a pedestal – the one which QMC had already claimed.

Within the last 5 seconds of the match, Markt Indersdorf’s scissor lift slowly rose skywards to tumultuous applause, lifting their token above QMC’s and onto the pedestal, usurping the square from QMC. Not only was this a first for the competition, but it won them the game and first place.

We were very impressed by the quality of the teams’ robots this year. Congratulations to everyone who took part. We hope you’ve had fun!

If you didn’t take part but your appetite’s been whetted, or you want to enter again next year, the sign up page for next year’s competition will be up in a couple of weeks. Get forming your teams and talking to your teachers now!

Results

For full details on the awards, please see the rulebook.

Media

Photos can be found on the Student Robotics 2013 Competition Flickr group.

The SR Team