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2021-05-08
: SR2021 Issue 05
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The
Student Robotics (Almost) Weekly
Newsletter is a (roughly) fortnightly
newsletter which summarises the goings‐on
across Student Robotics. Emboldened
items are ones for which additional help
has been requested.
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Headlines
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St
Paul’s College storm to victory
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Student
Robotics 2021 Virtual Competition came to
an exciting conclusion last weekend, 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.
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Competition
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Leagues
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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.
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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.
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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 leauge sessions.
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Knockouts
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Last
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.
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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.
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Finals
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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.
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Results
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Prize | Team |
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| 1st Place | SPA: St Paul’s College,
Adelaide | | 2nd Place | HRS3: Hills Road
Sixth Form College Team 3 | | 3rd Place |
MCK: The Malay College Kuala Kangsar | |
Committee Award | HRS2: Hills Road Sixth
Form College Team 2 | | Rookie Award |
WER: We Robot | | Online Presence | YSH:
Yayasan Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah |
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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.
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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.
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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. |
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Rewatch
the streams!
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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:
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Subscribe
to SR(A)WN
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You
can keep up with SR(A)WN online:
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