With furrowed brows, earnest whispering and feverish activity dedicated groups of computer programmers, engineers and support crew enthusiastically competed in this year’s Robocup competitions. 

The Robocup competition is open to students of all ages from schools and after school clubs with an interest in building, programming and competing and a variety of different Robotic Challenges. 

The three main categories include:

• Soccer
  
• Search and Rescue
  
• Theatre
  

This year we had four teams compete at the regional competition.

Search and Rescue

SARbot - Ketaki Bagal and Renee Grant

The Backseat Drivers - Ella Calder, Imogene MacLean, Lucy Goodeve

Soccer

The Pentagon – Joanna Liu, Lara Seaton, Ruth Huang, Shannon Sealy, Isabella Siu

Jerk-Jounce-Snap-Crackle-Pop – Kate Truman, Heather Robertson and Ghazal Dousti

Heather and Maia Robertson also entered as independent competitors.

The teamwork and effort displayed by all of the Columba teams were evident long before the competitions as they regularly met during lunchtimes, after school and in the weekends to build and program their robots. On the day the pressure was on as the teams had to continually test and refine their robot’s build and code to suit the competition environment.

Three of the teams (SARbot, The Backseat Drivers and Jerk-Jounce-Snap-Crackle-Pop) continued to refine their robots and entered into the Robocup Nationals Competition where they competed against teams from around the country. A special mention goes to Ketaki Bagal and Renee Grant who won the Premier Search and Rescue section.

Keep an eye out for Robocup signups in the new year for 2018.