The locations for Student Robotics 2017 Kickstart have been announced.
Kickstart is the event which kicks off a competition year, where the game will
be announced and robotics kits will be handed out to the teams. This year the
kickstart event will be on the 15th of October 2016.
The venues for Student Robotics 2017 kickstart are:
Select your kickstart from the above list for more information. If students
want to take part, but haven’t already signed up to compete, they can join the
waiting list by starting a team.
This year’s competition was streamed live from 4 different cameras around the
arenas. The recording of the stream of the league matches, and
for the knockouts are available on YouTube.
The challenge: Sunny Side Up
For this year’s game, the competitors had to build and program
robots to turn tokens so that their side faces upwards. Additional points could
be scored by moving suitable turned tokens into the robots’ corner zone. Full
details can be found in the rulebook.
This presented an especially difficult challenge; to score well, teams had to
program their robots to decide which way to rotate their cubes based on their
orientation. It was also a difficult challenge mechanically, as teams had to
engineer a robust way to rotate their cubes.
The 2016 arena layout
The standard of robots was high this year, with some very advanced robots and a
variety of approaches for flipping cubes. Whether it was vacuum pumps, a
turntable, or even just a stick pointing out of the front of the robot, almost
all of the robots were interesting and well designed. Some highlights were:
The Committee Award, given for an elegant and well made solution to this
year’s challenge, was awarded to Tunbridge Wells Grammar School for Boys,
for their design
made out of beautifully-machined wood.
The team from The Ladies' College holding their robot and being presented their second prize, the Rookie award
The Rookie Award is for the rookie team who performed best in the league.
Considering the team from The Ladies’ College managed to achieve 2nd
place overall, they very much deserved the award.
The team from Gymnasium Markt Indersdorf, winners of the Robot and Team Image award
The Robot and Team Image prize is for the team which present themselves and
their robot in the most outstanding manner. This year the prize went to the team
from ‘Measure, Analyze, Improve’ from Gymnasium Markt Indersdorf,
who came all the way from Germany looking very Frankenstein-esque, wearing their
bio-hazard suits and zombie face paints. Their robot was a rotten-fleshy-green
colour with a brain exposed.
The Online Presence award is given to the team with the best website, social
media presence, or combination of the two. This year it was awarded to ‘Team QMC’
from Queen Mary’s College for their entertaining regular updates on their
blog and their relentless interaction on twitter.
For official details of what the awards are, please see the rulebook.
The teams
44 teams made it to the competition this year, 6 of whom came from schools or
colleges which had not competed before.
Student Robotics 2017 promises to be bigger than ever! If you’d like to compete,
see Compete page for more information. Start
talking to your teachers and recruiting team members as soon as possible!
The Student Robotics 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; a two-day event for more than 50 teams and over 400 students.
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 end 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.
High resolution photographs of the event will be uploaded to the Flickr group.
If you would like to find out more, please get in touch.
Student Robotics is independent from the University of Southampton. ↩
The competition venue and dates for SR2016 have now been confirmed. Once again
the competition will return to the Newbury Racecourse Grandstand which has
successfully hosted the competition over the past two years.
The competition weekend will be the 30th April and 1st May. Over the two day
event the teams’ robots will first compete in a series of league matches, during
which they will continue to improve their hardware and software. These matches
will then seed a knockout to choose the overall winners.
In each match the robots will play Sunny Side Up, in which the aim is to turn as
many of the nine tokens the right way up and then collect as many as they can
into their home zone.
In addition to the coveted 1st, 2nd and 3rd prizes, there are awards for the
highest placed new team, the most ingenious robot and the best presented team
among others. For full details of the rules of the game and the prizes available
see the rulebook.
Whether you’re supporting a team or just want to watch, the competition is open
to everyone over the whole weekend. We particularly recommend coming along for
the finals on Sunday afternoon.
