INTRODUCTION

Our team, Tom Carlisle, Vasili Filippatos and I competed as the only Wyvern team in the Rescue compartment. There was also another team in the dance compartment consisting of Toby Eastway and Stirling Williams. We competed against hundreds of teams in these competitions, programming our way to victory.

ROUNDS

We competed in a number of rounds, if you performed well enough in your allocated rounds at the end of the first period then you would go into the next round. We will talk about going into the next round in the different sections.

RoboCup Dance

Stirling Williams & Toby Eastway

At RoboCup there were lots of people that had lots of robots some had small robots and some had big robots. There was a lot of waiting around but when we had our turn it was all worth it. We went to the interview, they look at our robot and told us that it was up to robocup standard.

Robocup Rescue

Tom Carlisle, Vasili Filippatos & Bodie Young

In the rescue section, we had built a robot that had to play out a scenario. This scenario was that there had been a disaster and they needed it to follow a line from the city limits through the course and had to overcome numerous obstacles, these included marked intersections, obstructions to the line and ramps and speed humps. And the final obstacle that you had to do was a chemical spill, or a green area where you had to locate a randomly placed “victim” that you had to push out of the spill. There were 6 different courses, all varying in shape, size and difficulty. And, you got to allocate a “drop zone” where you could start your robot if it failed a part. On the day they randomised the tiles in which they built the course, meaning you had to program the robot with sensors and tell it what to do through code. The robot we used was a mindstorms ev3 robot. However this was one of our own robots that was higher quality than the school’s current ones. Of course, there are different strategies to completing the course, for example, last year, our team used three sensors instead of two, and we used the school’s robots. This shows the diversity in programs and robots designs , on the day we saw hundreds of different robots, all with unique things that made them good.

Conclusion

Robocup was a thrilling and fun experience and we enjoyed it in every way, the moments of despair, and those of happiness. In the end it bonded all the robocup teams together and taught us a thing or two we didn’t know.

Bodie Young & Stirling Williams