Our Kit team has been hard at work and are delighted to announce the release of the Kit Software version 2023.1.0 🎉. The full changelog for this release is on the updates page but we wanted to highlight a few of the notable improvements!

Remote Debugging

If there’s one piece of advice we give to our teams it’s “Test, Test, Test” and with Remote Debugging we hope to make this even easier!

Using VS Code (or any editor that supports DAP) competitors can now step through their code while it is executing on the robot. This will allow competitors to inspect variables, change execution flow, and gain a much deeper understanding of what their robot is doing at that very moment.

Read the docs to learn more!

Dark Mode

We’re happy to announce that the Student Robotics Web Interface now has a Dark Mode!

The Web Interface will automatically use the system’s preferred colour scheme, but you can also manually toggle between light and dark mode if you wish.

Improved Vision

We’ve tweaked the calibration of the vision system to make it more accurate. We’ve also added support for processing images through our vision system after the image has been captured, unlocking the ability for teams to develop their own image processing pipelines.

Marker Sizes Changed

The last rules update reduced the size of the markers, and we’ve updated the vision system to match. You’ll need to re download the marker images and print them at the new size for vision to work as expected.

Vision Axes Changes

We’ve also made some opt-in changes to the vision axes. These changes are not enabled by default so as not to break existing code, but we recommend that teams update to use the new axes. By passing legacy_camera_axis=False to your Robot constructor you can opt-in to the new axes. These now follow the standard right-handed coordinate system, with the X axis pointing forwards, the Y axis pointing to the left and the Z axis pointing up. Yaw, pitch and roll are also corrected to their expected directions.

Student Robotics 2023 was Kickstarted on Saturday 22nd September at the University of Southampton and on our livestream. It was great to see the excitement building at our first in-person Kickstart since SR2019.

Our game this year, Greed, challenges teams to steal tokens from other scoring zones. With Bronze, Silver, and Gold tokens, each worth a different number of game points, teams must think carefully about the optimum strategy. To help teams locate tokens they have 2D barcode style markers attached that our computer vision library can detect. However each of the markers will identify themselves as exactly the same, so teams must use other sensors to detect which type of token is which. Bronze and Silver tokens are the same size but the Silver tokens weigh 300g more, and Gold tokens are larger than Bronze and Silver. Teams are scored at the end of the match for collecting the most points. Full details, including the prizes available this year, are available in the rulebook.

This year we have also introduced a new way for teams to earn league points, Challenges! There are three challenges which teams may optionally complete during the competition year in order. These challenges encourage teams to start work on their robots early and cover movement, sensors, and vision. The challenges may be approached in any order, and completing challenges before certain deadlines will earn the teams bonus league points. Full details of the challenges are available in the rulebook and the deadlines are on our events page.

This year’s teams have already been strategising their approaches, and we can’t wait to see their progress over the year!

If you weren’t able to attend Kickstart this year, or would like a recap, you can:

• watch our livestream where we explain the game and how this year’s competition will work.
• download the presentation in which we explain this year’s game and how the competition is running this year.
• download the microgames which are small activities designed to let you become familiar with the Student Robotics simulator.

If you’re a competitor, be sure to check out our Kickstarted, now what? blog post for some next steps.

The Student Robotics Kit has received an upgrade! Thanks to the generosity of the Institution of Engineering and Technology and the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, we are now using Raspberry Pi computers in our kits. We’ve also developed an add-on board for the Pi (known as the KCH), which provides power to the Pi and several LEDs to indicate a robot’s status.

Raspberry Pis

Previously our kits used an ODROID U3+ as their brain, which served us well for many years. However, difficulties in procurement and teams needing increasing computing power led us to look for alternatives. We settled on using Raspberry Pi 4Bs with 2GB of RAM. These are easier to purchase, offer excellent computing performance, have built in WiFi, and much more.

The KCH

With a new powerful computer at the heart of our kit, we have also designed and built a new add-on HAT called the KCH. Named in memory of a Student Robotics volunteer who sadly passed away in 2020, it serves as a reminder of his love of robotics, innovation, and bees.

The KCH is responsible for powering the Pi and providing output to users regarding the robot’s status. The board has LEDs showing the boot progress of the Pi, indicators for the current status of the code, and most excitingly three user-programmable RGB LEDs. These LEDs provide an easy way to output what your robot is doing at that moment, which can be an invaluable debugging aid.

Take note that the Pi is now powered from the L2 12V port of the Power Board rather than the 5V port. The docs have been updated to state this, but we thought it was worth re-iterating.

Thanks

This kit revision has been made possible by the generosity of the Institution of Engineering and Technology and the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. They selected us as recipients of the Engineering Education Grant Scheme, for which we are incredibly grateful.

The volunteers on our Kit Team also deserve thanks and recognition for their herculean effort to get this revision sorted. A tremendous amount of planning and preparation was needed for this kit revision. There was hardware design, software updates, and cleaning and sorting the existing kit. All while being geographically distributed around the UK (and Europe)!

Student Robotics is 100% free to enter and provides exciting real world engineering challenges for students aged 16-19. If you’re interested in taking part, you can find out more on our Compete page. If you’re interested in becoming a volunteer, you can find more information and sign up on our Volunteer page.