Congratulations to Henry Eden-Mann and his team, Visionaries who won the Programming Prize in the 2017 RoboCup Junior Competition in June.

The team have been working on the Soccer playing robots since the start of the year. They completely custom built the robots from scratch rather than using pre-built lego mindstorms. They did this to make the robots incredibly sophisticated to mimic true soccer plays.

The robots have Raspberry Pi's, Arduinos and Cameras, Range sensors, Infra-red sensors, compasses and accelerometers built into them. Using all of these sensors the aim of the game is to track the ball and score into the enemy's goal.

The team won the first place programming prize and were also placed third in the soccer and wentto the Nationals in September. They won an $800 robot controller which will be used to control the DIY 3d printer that Henry is making. 

Henry's team was Tobias Devereux, Sebastian Sole and Henry. 

Their challenge before Nationals is to refine the code to be more streamlined. 

The team Visionaries competed under the Information Science Department of the University of Otago.