With the competition only two months away, we are now happy to announce that the Student Robotics 2015 competition will take place on 25th and 26th April at Newbury Racecourse. 54 teams from the UK and Germany will compete in a robotic Capture The Flag with the autonomous robots they have built over the last six months.

The teams will arrive on Saturday morning. The knockout matches will begin on Sunday, with the finals that afternoon. The competition will be open to the public for the whole weekend, but we recommend coming along for the finals on Sunday afternoon.

For further details please see the competition’s [event page][].

The 2015 Student Robotics competition has started with various Kickstart events. Kickstarts were held at the University of Southampton, the University of Bristol and Facebook HQ in London. There is also a Kickstart event occurring in Munich soon.

There are 54 teams competing in this year’s Student Robotics competition, coming from across the United Kingdom and Germany. We have generated a map of where all competing teams are from this year.

The game: Capture the Flag

This year’s competition is all about retrieving flags from around the arena and putting them into the competitor’s zone to get points. The flags are built from wooden cubes on ball casters.

Read more about the new game or for full details please reference the rulebook.

Kit upgrades

Student Robotics volunteers have worked hard producing a whole range of new kit for Student Robotics 2015. These upgrades include:

Power Board

This year comes with an all new Power Board which allows for the control of up to six external powered components.

Brain Board

The new Brain Board is the Odroid U3. It’s a small but powerful Linux computer with a 1.7GHz Quad Core ARM processor and packs 2GB of RAM. These boards are similar to the Raspberry Pi, but are often reported as being between 6 and 12 times more powerful.

Tablets

There is an all new way of debugging robots this year, which is through the use of a tablet. The tablets connect to the Brain Board through WiFi and gives the ability to view logs and start/stop the robot remotely — without chasing the robot half way around the school!

We are also working on streaming the camera and having control over individual components.

Servo Board

The new Servo Board allows for control over up to 12 servos simultaneously.

Interconnect

The new inter-board communication system has been upgraded entirely to USB. This makes communication faster, wiring easier, and the kit more robust.

Final words

This year’s competition should be an exhilarating event, and all of the Student Robotics volunteers are looking forward to seeing how well the robots compete!

The Student Robotics team

Headington School, Oxford came top of the class in this year’s Student Robotics tournament this weekend (27^th May 2014) at The Racecourse, Newbury. The team of sixth form girls beat 53 other school teams from the UK, France and Germany with a self-driving robot that uses a camera to find prize tokens.

Headington School (pictured) narrowly beat Gordano School from Bristol, who came in second place. Clifton High School, also from Bristol, and Runshaw College, from Lancashire, came joint in a 3^rd place^†.

Student Robotics 2014 was the biggest and best yet, with over 230 rounds played over 2 days. Up to four robots competed head to head in each round, pushing past each other to grab as many tokens as possible in 3 minutes. Run entirely by volunteers, Student Robotics is free for teams to enter thanks to our sponsors, primarily the Motorola Foundation and the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science. This year the competition was also livestreamed on the internet thanks to our latest sponsor, the British Amateur Television Club.

The challenge: Slots

This year’s competition involved building a robot that could move around an arena handling bulky prize tokens and drop them into tight-fitting slots. In addition, and in a first for Student Robotics, the token’s orientation was also a means to score points. The best robots had to be able to rotate them before placing the token into their designated area.

Find out more about the intricacies of the game in the rulebook.

Prizes

Aside from the best scoring robots, we also reward teams which excel in other areas.

The First Robot Movement and Rookie Award prizes are reserved for teams new to the competition. The Rookie Award is given to the rookie team which places highest in the league stage of the competition.

The first new team to post a video of their robot moving on its own in a controlled manner win the First Robot Movement award. This encourages new teams to get a basic chassis built quickly, as well as getting them to write some simple control software for it. The committee were impressed that Torquay Boys’ video appeared within two weeks of the Kickstart.

The Committee Award is given to the team which finds a simple and elegant solution to a problem. This was demonstrated brilliantly by MAI, whose robot used a suction grabber to roll the tokens towards it in order to turn them over as well as easily carry them.

The Online Presence prize is given to the team judged to have the best combination of website, blog and other online activities.

The Robot and Team Image prize is given to the team which present their robot and themselves in the most outstanding way. Systemetric (HRS) impressed the judges with their steampunk costumes and brass and mahogany robot (pictured).

Prize	Team
1st Place	Headington School, Oxford (HSO)
2nd Place	Gordano School (GRD)
3rd Place (Tie†)	“Team Ninja Bot”, Clifton High School (CLF) and “Colossal Denominators”, Runshaw College (RUN)
Rookie Award	Torquay Boys Grammar School (TBG)
Committee Award	“MAI Senior”, Gymnasium Markt Indersdorf (MAI)
Robot and Team Image	“Systemetric”, Hills Road Sixth Form College (HRS)
First Robot Movement	Torquay Boys Grammar School (TBG)
Online Presence	“The Astromechs”, Peter Symonds College (PSC)

^{† Due to an error in the handling of the scores in the final match, this was unfortunately announced incorrectly as only CLF on the day.}

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

The Teams

Every year the teams get better and better, which is not an easy feat! The judges were very impressed by the wide variety of robots entered this year, including the hexapod from Greshams, a boarding school near Norfolk.

This is the first walking robot Student Robotics has ever seen, walking in the absent dust of the hovercraft we saw at last year’s competition.

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 soon. Get forming your teams and talking to your teachers now!

Media

High resolution photographs of the event can be found on the Student Robotics 2014 competition Flickr group. For more information, please contact us.

The Student Robotics Team