Student Robotics (SR) is a project that I have been a part of since I started Uni almost two years ago. It started as a group of electronic engineering students thought that they could replicate the formula that's used by FIRST but on a slightly smaller scale and with alterations so it would work in the UK.
From that basis they recruited other students at the University of Southampton Department of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), including myself, to help them build some kits that could be handed out to the students invited to the competition, as well as organise the competition. The group grew from a small, now depreciated, facebook group and meetings of a few people to its own website and larger meetings, organised by a dedicated committee in a matter of a little over a term. The committee was formalised just before the Easter break of 2007, and I found myself in the position of Vice President, responsible for overseeing the mechanical side of the project. Stephen English was elected Chairman, supported by Robert Spanton as President, Nick Greatbatch as Treasurer and Áron Kisdi as Secretary.
During the summer term the group worked on a suitable competition concept that would allow teams less able to compete easily, but would also allow more able teams to be more creative with their solutions: the teams would build roughly shoebox sized robots which would use a provided vision system to locate brightly painted wooden blocks or 'tokens' and then return them to a home area to score points. This, of course, went through a number of revisions and rule changes before the rules were published. Meanwhile a number of local schools were contacted and invited to be part of the competition, with varying responses and the hardware kits were prepared. Activity necessarily lessened due to exam pressures, but picked up again with renewed vigour once they were over and during the summer holidays the electronics kits for the students were further improved such that by September they were almost ready for release. Sponsors were also found in the form of ECS, the SCA, SUSU and most notably Motorola via the Motorola Foundation and the website prepared for use by the teams and sponsors, on this front we used Joomla, an open source Content Management System, and trac for ticketting and wiki.
In September of 2007 the group held a KickStart event for the sixth-form students invited from the local schools which began the first year's competition. This would be a six month planning and building period for the students, far longer than anything else many of them had ever participated in, and six months of mentoring for the university students who made up the SR group. The day consisted of four short talks on Prototyping, Time Management, Programming and Our Kits, given by SR menbers as well as an activity in which the teams made rubber band / balloon powered cars whilst being bombarded with distractions to simultate the competition and the time pressures that would be experienced then.
During the Easter term of 2008 a University film crew made up of student on Media and Film courses requested to follow one of the teams progress in the competition and has since made a documentary of the selected team, which happened to win this year's competition.
Easter 2008 brought the mentoring / building time to a close with the competition which everyone had been looking forward to. The competition was preceded by a day's crash course in programming for those who needed it provided by the mentors, some of whom, myself included, were learning the python language at the same time. The day also allowed the teams to compare their robots against those of other teams for the first time and for the mentors as a whole to check the viability of the robots.
The Competition Day day dawned a mere two days later and too early in the morning to really think about stuff the SR mentors and others met to build the arena and otherwise prepare for a long day in the Cube. After breakfast the teams started arriving with their robots and were each allocated a pit area. In the pit areas were a table with a networked computer on, each running a live CD of Ubuntu Linux, which had been set out the previous evening. This enabled them to work on the programming of their robots as the competition went on, allowing for bug fixes and improvements in their code, as well as to the SR code that was downloaded with theirs when they hit save. From the pits each robot would progress to the arena, an 8x8 metre square laid out in white coated hardboard with more hardboard up the sides, where it would (hopefully) drive around in search of tokens. Some of the robots were more successful than others, with some teams merely scoring points using a basic search algorithm, not using the vision system. The day was filmed both by the film crew making a documentary, but also by a crew from the local Daily Echo, who posted a video on their site.
The competition was regarded by all as a major success, and as SR plans next year, including various upgrades to the website, which now uses Drupal; hardware and software a new committee has been elected: Áron Kisdi is now Chairman, supported by Chris Cross as President, Dan Mulvaney as Vice President, Jeremy Morse as Treasurer and myself as Secretary. As such the new committee hopes to make next year's competition as good as this years.
