Sixth Form code their way through the Student Robotics competition

Recently, the Student Robotics team headed to Southampton for the competition final. Despite a few hurdles in the lead up to the competition, the team were thrilled to reach the semi-finals, and are pleased to report they have retained their position as champions of the viral competition round.

Oliver (L6M2) has written the below account to explain the team’s journey: 

“Recently, the Habs team set off for Southampton for the Student Robotics competition, an annual fixture in the calendar of STEM competitions. This year, the programming team consisted of Oliver (L6M2) and Dawei (L6C1), and the engineering team was represented by Alex (L6C1), Jun (L6J1), Eddie (L6M2), Krish (L6S2) and Sanjhay (L6M2). Thomas (U6J2), Shivank (U6M2) and Aran (U6M2) provided an invaluable presence when it came to moral support, catering and espionage – Miss Harrison and Mr Lee also kindly supported us on the trip. 

The robotics journey had begun in October 2023 with the announcement of this year’s competition: collecting the maximum number of asteroids – cubes with computer-readable markers on them – and depositing them into “spaceships”. After a series of team-building activities, the engineering team got to work on an innovative design, while the programmers turned their attention to the virtual competition, which took place a month before the real thing entirely in a simulated arena with simulated robots, allowing them to get coding before a physical robot was available. After more than 1000 lines of code, much deliberation and a set of friendly matches, the code was finally ready to be submitted, and, armed with some complex maths and custom robot architecture to allow many tasks to be carried out seemingly in parallel, we were able to pull off an almost perfect record of 1st, 1st, 1st and 3rd in the four  matches. Having come first place in the 2023 competition, we were once again at the top of the leaderboards going into the 2024 edition, and the pressure was on to keep up the performance in the far more important real-life matches. 

For reasons that are difficult to understand, the state of the robot that Friday night could most accurately be described as ‘shambolic’ – the innovative design of the robot, attempting to use a conveyor belt with flaps to catch onto the cubes, fell apart at the eleventh hour as friction, misprinted parts and inexplicably weak stepper motors all spelled disaster. As the engineers hatched the ingenious backup plan of folding a piece of cardboard in two and bolting it to the front of the robot, Oliver and Dawei wondered how many bugs were lying hidden in their code, which had not yet been tested on the physical robot. 

Seeing how many of the robots failed to even start up when it came to the competition infused us with a tinge of hope for what was to come. As the day progressed, our consistency improved, and by the end of the day, we had held onto second place. We felt mildly optimistic heading into Sunday. Even after some catastrophic engineering issues throughout Sunday’s league matches, we managed to hold onto 6th place, thus qualifying directly to the quarterfinals. There was a certain degree of pride in getting to this point despite having a barely functioning robot, any progression would have been an amazing victory. 

In the knockout stages of the competition, the top 2 competitors from each match progress to the next round. We were matched against Royal Grammar School Guilford (RGS), a very strong team who we were certain would win and two other teams who had reached the quarter finals who we would have to beat to prolong our journey. We got off to a strong start, moving two asteroids into our home region – another robot accidentally gifted us some free points. As time went on, RGS cemented their lead as expected and the match ended in a tie for second place. The tiebreak metric of choice was position in the league, so by the skin of our teeth, we beat out the competition to reach the top 8 – the mood was incredulous. 

Sadly, the semi-finals would spell the end of the road for the team. A glitch from the untouchable RGS robot caused it to barrel into the centre pedestal, which in turn interfered with the turning of our robot and we were out of the competition. As we watched the wildly entertaining remaining semi-final and grand finale, with further upsets, twists of fate and the eventual winner proved to be Munich’s Gymnasium Markt Indersdorf. We were forced to concede that if we were able to get this far this year, imagine what we could achieve again in the future. Hopefully, that will be the story of Student Robotics 2025.”