We’re pleased to announce this year’s competition dates.

The Student Robotics 2019 competition will be held at Southampton University on the 6th and 7th of April 2019.

These two days mark the ultimate stage of SR2019, showcasing the months of preparation. Our teams will work hard to push their robots to the limit and quickly make repairs between league matches. We will finish the weekend with the finals where the best bots will be named victorious.

As usual, we will require attendees to fill out a media consent form.

For more information, please see the competition event page.

See you there!

As was announced at Kickstart, we will be running some Tech Days during this competition year.

Tech Days are opportunities for teams to make concentrated progress on their robots with help from highly-experienced blue-shirts. They’re also an opportunity to get technical help and to see how well teams are doing in comparison to other teams. Later Tech Days may feature mockups of the arena, enabling teams to test their robots in more realistic ways.

As with all other events, students must be accompanied by a responsible adult.

We will be running Tech Days at the University of Southampton on the following Saturdays:

• 15th December 2018
• 9th February 2019
• 9th March 2019

These Tech Days will be at the Highfield campus, start around 10am, and finish around 5pm. However are free to attend for as much of that time as they would like.

We are also planning to run some Tech Days in London. If you would be interested in a tech day in London too on these dates, please let us know as soon as possible. For the December tech day, we need enough teams by Wednesday 12th to make it happen.

We look forward to seeing your robots at our Tech Days!

We had a successful Kickstart on Saturday and it was great to see the excited teams getting familiar with our kit.

Our game this year, Caldera, challenges teams to control scoring zones with tokens while navigating an arena with raised platforms. Twenty-five scoring zones are arranged in a grid, varying in value from two points for each of the outermost 16, a ring of eight on a raised “volcano” worth seven points apiece, to the the central “caldera” which is worth thirty points.

Teams can claim one of the scoring zones by placing more of their tokens in it than any opposing team. Additionally the value of any scoring zone can be multiplied by careful position of the robot at the end of the match. Full details, including the prizes available this year, are available in the rulebook.

We’ve already seen the teams come up with some innovative solutions and it’s going to be interesting to see how they develop.

All competitors should now have user accounts for our website. This includes our IDE for teams to write their code in. This also includes our forums which are a great place to brainstorm with other teams and discuss any problems which you run into.

(See our docs if you are not able to log in.)

If you weren’t able to attend Kickstart this year, or would like a recap, you can download:

• The presentation in which we explain this year’s game and how the competition is running this year.
• The microgames which are small activities designed to let you become familiar with the Student Robotics kit.