The annual Student Robotics KickStart is coming up this Saturday! It is with this event that SR2013 begins. Teams from around the country will be attending to meet other competitors, discover this year’s game, and learn about the challenges ahead of them.

Information for registered teams:

KickStart will be happening on Saturday the 3rd of November — please aim to arrive at 9:00. We’ll be starting in Building 32 on the University of Southampton’s Highfield Campus, please see the campus map (pdf) and this street map, showing the location of the campus. The day will finish at around 15:30, and we will be handing out kit then. This will include 2m aluminium L-sections, so please be sure you can transport them.

The schedule for the day is as follows:

• 10:00 - Arrival
• 10:30 - Introductory talk, introduction to the game etc
• 11:00 - Mini-game and competition
• 12:50 - Break for lunch
• 14:00 - Talk: Mechanics
• 14:30 - Talk: Electronics
• 15:00 - Short break, with biscuits and tea
• 15:20 - Talk: Software
• 15:50 - Talk: Teamwork and organisation
• 16:20 - Kit collection

We’ll be putting out signs indicating places to park on campus. Unfortunately, we cannot provide food — we recommend either bringing your own lunch or visiting one of the shops around and about the campus.

We very much hope to see you there!

The SR Team

Today we opened up registration for the upcoming edition of our competition, SR2013. 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 2013.

If you have a team of 16-18 year-olds that you would like to register for the competition, please fill out this registration form and we will get in touch with you as soon as we can. Thanks to our sponsors, we can accept 36 teams for this year’s competition.

Student Robotics 2012 is over! After much hard work, hacking, and bodging, twenty teams from sixteen UK schools across five counties, and three countries came together to pit their robotic creations in a mammoth battle of wits.

Each team had to build a robot that could collect tokens & buckets to score points. Further points could be scored by placing the tokens into the robots’ zones, and by placing tokens into the collected buckets. The robots used a number of sensing mechanisms, from the provided vision system to various implementations of distance sensors.

The two days comprised a gruelling 46 match league stage provided seeding for the later knock-out stage that would determine the winners of Student Robotics 2012. Congratulations to all the competitors, whatever place achieved, we hope that you’ve all had fun & learnt something along the way.

Results

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

Media

Once again the competition received real-time coverage from a live video feed and a twitter stream. Images from the event are available in the sr2012 group on Flickr.

The SR Team