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2021-05-08 : SR2021 Issue 05
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The Student Robotics (Almost) Weekly Newsletter is a (roughly) fortnightly newsletter which summarises the goings‐on across Student Robotics. Emboldened items are ones for which additional help has been requested.
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Headlines
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St Paul’s College storm to victory
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Student Robotics 2021 Virtual Competition came to an exciting conclusion last weekend, with the rookie team from St Paul’s College, Adelaide, storming to victory in a close match against Hills Road Sixth Form College third team.
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Competition
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Leagues
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Our competition event this year spread the league stage over four weekends throughout the year. After each league session the game gained additional modules that presented new and different challenges to the competitors. In addition to the formal league sessions, there were also some more casual friendlies sessions which allowed the teams to experiment with different strategies and test their code against other teams’ in a more relaxed environment.
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While this year’s competition presented a different challenge to the competitors that previous years’, the core challenge to create an autonomous robot remained the same.
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During the league sessions there were some teams which showed strong early performances. Initially the teams from Hills Road Sixth Form College looked to be the teams to beat. The later leagues however were the battleground of a different collection of teams, with KEGS Chelmsford (KEG), Gymnasium Markt Indersdorf (MAI) as well as rookie teams St Paul’s College (SPA) and We Robot (WER) in particular performing the best in the fourth and most complex of the leauge sessions.
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Knockouts
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Last weekend the competition culminated in a series of single-elimination knockout matches, allowing the teams robots to demonstrate the peak of their capabilities. The initial pairings of the knockouts were seeded based on performance in the leagues, however this by no means guaranteed a smooth path to the final.
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Many teams had ramped up their improvements towards the end of the competition, allowing for some incredibly well contested matches and some surprising outcomes. A particular example of this was team MCK from The Malay College Kuala Kangsar who had finished the leagues near the bottom of the league table and thus faced a challenging set of matches. Nevertheless they managed to knock out the top seed, team MAI from Gymnasium Markt Indersdorf and went on to secure a place on the podium.
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Finals
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The final match saw St Paul’s College (SPA) and Hills Road Team 3 (HRS3) battle for the top spot. Both teams having shown their incredible abilities throughout the competition. Whilst the robots started off with very different tactics, they were both accruing points very quickly. Due to a large number of link breakages, which the robots actively detected and reacted to, the points and leader switched massively throughout the match. When the clock struck zero it was 36 points to 8 in favour of St Paul’s, giving them the title.
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Results
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| Prize | Team | |-----------------|--------------------------------------------| | 1st Place | SPA: St Paul’s College, Adelaide | | 2nd Place | HRS3: Hills Road Sixth Form College Team 3 | | 3rd Place | MCK: The Malay College Kuala Kangsar | | Committee Award | HRS2: Hills Road Sixth Form College Team 2 | | Rookie Award | WER: We Robot | | Online Presence | YSH: Yayasan Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah |
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With a consistently strong performance, scoring well in the first league and really stepping up their game in the final league session French team We Robot ended the league stage with the highest number of game points of any team. While this didn’t place them at the top of the league leaderboard, they were the highest placed rookie team and thus earned the Rookie Award.
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The Committee Award is given for extraordinary ingenuity or simple elegance in the design of their solution. Team HRS2 from Hills Road Sixth Form College earned this prize in recognition of the high quality of the code that they wrote for their robot. In particular it was clean and easy to read, neatly organised in separate files, with good comments. Their code made good use of a state machine as part of its main control loop and PID control for their movement.
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We also encourage teams to share their progress towards their robots throughout the year. Team YSH from Yayasan Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah earned the Online Presence Award for their Instagram posting throughout the year covering their approach to the competition, strategy and reviews of their performance in the leagues. |
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Rewatch the streams!
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If you’d like to relive the highs and lows of the competition livestreams, the videos remain available on YouTube, as well as a cut-down video of the final:
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Subscribe to SR(A)WN
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You can keep up with SR(A)WN online:
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