Published on: 19 July 2018




For the past four years our Senior School Robotics Club has competed strongly in the annual RoboCup and this year has been no exception, with the team recently claiming 5th place in the worldwide competition held in Montreal, Canada.

As one of the world’s leading technology events, this year’s competition welcomed 5000 robots and 4000 participants from 35 different countries. The competition has many categories including rescue scenarios, logistics, domestic robots, many divisions of soccer robots, and teams range in ages from school through to PhD.

“We are pleased to be finalists this year and as such, gain automatic entry to next year’s competition,” says Team Coordinator and Design and Technology Teacher, Patrick Louden.

“Our team comprising of Year 11 student engineers Ben Lane, Samuel Hoffmann, Callum Koh and Will Harris performed admirably in the three days of preliminary competition and, on placing 5th, were invited to compete in the finals against four other teams from Mexico, Slovenia, USA and Japan.”

“This year we entered the Rapidly Manufactured Robot Challenge (RMRC) which is a relatively new competition for mini rescue robots. The challenge involves rapid prototyping techniques to build robots that are tested on a standardised physical terrain, manipulation and visual recognition tasks to score points.”

“RoboCup is an amazing event. While teams compete against each other, there is also a collaborative and cooperative spirit that exists between teams. For example, teams share equipment and insights to assist each other during competition and in the RMRC there is also a requirement to share coding and CAD/CAM files as part of the ordinary course of proceedings.”

“The boys have learned a great deal through their involvement in RoboCup and have returned full of energy and ideas to continue the development of mini rescue robots.”

Next year’s RoboCup will be hosted at the International Conference Centre (ICC) in Sydney, Australia.