We’re excited to announce that registration for the 2021 season of Student
Robotics is now open!
Unfortunately, we were unable to find a way to run a physical competition in a
COVID safe way. Instead, following on from the success of our
previous virtual competition,
we will be running the competition in a simulated environment.
The competition cycle will start with a live streamed Kickstart event
on 21st November at which the game will be announced and the simulator shown off to teams.
The competition, which will take on May 1st 2021, will
see the robots compete through a league stage and a seeded knockout. As usual,
the prizes will recognise not only the teams which come top in the knockouts,
but also those who excel in other ways.
In addition to the main competition we will be running monthly league sessions
(starting in January) which will seed your position in the final knockout.
Details of the game and prizes will be revealed at Kickstart. Details of the
Kickstart can be found on its event page and competition events
will be published when they are available. We expect to confirm places before
Kickstart.
If you would like a chance to compete in Student Robotics 2021,
please fill in the entry form with the required information.
Congratulations to JAMDynamics who take victory in a tie-breaker match after a
strong performance in the league and knockout stages.
The Challenge: Two Colours
The virtual arena with its central raised platform
Our game this year, Two Colours, challenged teams retrieve gold or silver
coloured tokens from on and around a raised platform in the centre of the arena.
Having these tokens within their scoring zone (i.e. their corner of the arena)
at the end of the match would earn them 3 points apiece. However, if a robot
gathered more than one token colour within their scoring zone, each token’s
value drops from 3 points to 1 point. Full details of the game and the awards
available this year are available in the rulebook.
Our competition event this year was rather different to normal as COVID-19
prevented our usual weekend event. Instead the competition took place over
three weekends, with matches being livestreamed from within a simulator.
While this changed many aspects of the competition, the core challenge to create
an autonomous robot remained the same.
The Final
This year’s final featured four teams who had all proven their capabilities
throughout the competition. All robots got off to a strong start, though
JAMDynamics and Lawrence Sheriff School soon took a lead. However, later in the
match, the “poisoning” effect of having mixed tokens in a scoring zone changed
everything leaving all four teams with the same number of points.
This tie for first place lead to a tie-breaker match, played between the same
four teams though with their starting corners changed. Once again the
reliability of these four robots showed, with each collecting a token inside the
one minute mark. In the end it was JAMDynamics’ robot which was able to collect
three silver tokens, including one stolen from Hills Road Sixth Form College
second team’s scoring zone, which took victory.
While we weren’t able to see them in person, we saw some brilliant robot designs
and were continually impressed by the progress made throughout the year, both
posted online and at the Tech Days. Even during the virtual competition, it was
great to see the robot code improving week to week. We hope you enjoyed the
competition as much as we did!
If you didn’t take part, or you want to enter again next year, the
sign up page for next year’s competition will be
up later in the year. Get a team together and start talking to your teachers now!
With a dominating 111 league points, Kenilworth Sixth Form not only placed
highest among the rookie teams but placed highest overall in the league.
Especially given the changes to the competition through the year, beating other
more experienced teams is a remarkable feat.
The Committee Award is given for extraordinary ingenuity or simple elegance in
the design of their solution. Team SWI from South Wilts Grammar School earned
this prize for an impressive path-finding algorithm within their code. The
judges were additionally impressed by the clarity of the code and supporting
documentation, something which is easily overlooked when writing code. This also
showed in their robot’s performance, which was reliably able to navigate around
the central pedestal to collect tokens from the far side.
We also encourage teams to share their progress towards their robots throughout
the year. Team MAI from Gymnasium Markt Indersdorf earned the Online Presence
Award for their ongoing blog posting during both the lead-up to the physical
competition and after lockdown began as well as for their activity on the forums.
For full details on all the awards, please see the rulebook.
You can see a breakdown of scores for each match, as well as the overall league
ranking on the competition website.
Rewatch the streams
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 spectacular final and tie breaker:
Of course, this competition would not be possible without the tireless work of
our volunteers, who developed the simulated world the competition
was run in and enabled us to switch to a virtual competition. If you’d like to
get involved in organising future competitions, from developing the software and
hardware used by the teams to the events themselves we’re always looking for
people to join our team.
Notes to editors
Student Robotics is an annual robotics competition for 16-18 year-olds in the UK
and Europe. It was founded in 2006 by university students and is free to enter
thanks to our sponsors and many volunteers. Since it was first run
in 2008, the final competition has grown from one room at the University of
Southampton1 to the UK’s biggest autonomous robotics competition.
At the start of the academic year, teams are given a kit containing custom-made
electronics at a Kickstart event, where the game for the year is announced. They
then have until the start of the Easter holiday to build fully-autonomous robots
which will compete against each other in the final competition. They are
supported by volunteer mentors, and software to assist them in programming their
robots is provided.
If you would like to find out more, please get in touch.
The SR Team
Student Robotics is independent from the University of Southampton. ↩
After two weekends and 48 matches, the league stage of the SR2020 Virtual
Competition is complete, setting the stage for the knockouts and the grand final
next weekend.
This weekend saw strong performances from a number of teams, including a number
of firsts: Kenilworth Sixth Form collected 5 tokens into their scoring zone in
one match and both Hills Road Sixth Form College’s second team and JAMDynamics
stealing tokens from each others scoring zones.
Next weekend the teams will compete in the knockouts, which is the final test
for the teams’ months of coding preparation. Once again the teams have a week to
work on and improve their robots before the 10am BST deadline to submit their
code ahead of the next set of matches.
The robots which perform best will make it through the Quarter-Finals to the
Semi-Finals and then to the grand Final of Student Robotics 2020. It remains
possible for any team to become the overall winners – while the league scores
seed the knockouts, making progression easier for robots who scored well so far,
all teams will compete in the first round of the knockouts.
As well as prizes for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd places, teams are also competing
for a number of other awards, including the Committee Award (given to the team
that displays the most extraordinary ingenuity in their robot), and the Online
Presence Award (for the team that is judged to have the best online presence).
Full details of these awards and those for earlier stages of the competition are
available in our rulebook
If you would like to catch up on any of the league matches from the last two
weekends, they’re available on YouTube:
