We’re excited to announce that registration for the 2022 season of Student
Robotics is now open!
This year we’re delighted to return to an in person event after a couple
of years of virtual competitions due to COVID.
The competition cycle will start with a live streamed Kickstart event
on 13th November at which the game will be announced and the competition introduced.
The competition, which will take place sometime roughly around April 2022, 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.
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 2022,
please fill in the entry form with the required information.
Student Robotics 2021 Virtual Competition came to an exciting conclusion today,
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.
The Challenge: Radars of the Lost Ark
The final form of the virtual arena, as played in the fourth league session and knockouts.
Our game this year, Radars of the Lost Ark, challenged teams to score points
by claiming territories using radios. Teams had to navigate the arena scanning
for tower transmissions and sending their own transmissions back to claim
territories. However, only territories which were linked either to their
starting zone or to territories already owned could be claimed. At the end of
the match, teams were awarded points based on the territories they owned. Full
details, including the prizes available this year, are available in the
rulebook.
The Leagues
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.
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.
Teams’ game points per league session.
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
league sessions.
The Knockouts
This 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.
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.
The Final
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 final:
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 16-19 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. ↩
With the final 36 matches of the SR2021 League complete, team MAI from Gymnasium
Markt Indersdorf head up the leaderboard. They have managed to knock the teams from
Hills Road Sixth Form College out of the top spot. Of our rookie teams, teams WER
and SPA are looking to be the ones to watch though we’ve seen amazing progress
from all teams. With just an six point spread between the top nine teams the
finals are definitely much too close to close call!
Module Ⅳ, which is final iteration of this years game, was played for the
first time today. This module totally redesigned the arena, while keeping
the same game mechanics, meaning teams have had to make some large changes
to their strategy to ensure continued success. Our new larger arena includes
more territories, moveable obstacles, and new kinds of territories worth
varying points.
Now the league stage of the competition is over the Knockouts await.
The knockout will consist of play-in matches to identify the top 16 teams
followed by four rounds of single-elimination matches. Third place will be
decided by a play-off between the teams which place second in their semi-final
matches. Pairings are arranged such that the higher a team’s position in the league
the easier their path to the final.
If you would like to catch up on any of the matches so far, our livestreams are
available on YouTube:
