Sebastian Sole travelled to Auckland to compete in the RoboCup national competition, and has done us proud!
Two weeks ago, I flew up to Auckland to compete in the RoboCup Junior New Zealand national competition in the Senior Theatre category. I’ve been part of a group of school students, Info Sci Mechatronics, that meets twice weekly at the Department of Information Science, at the University of Otago. This group is mentored and taught by a Teaching Fellow, Chris Edwards. At the moment the team consists of four students from various schools in Dunedin. Earlier in the year we won the Otago regionals in the ‘theatre’ category. This category is where an individual or a team create and program robots that perform on a small stage; for example, robots that are programmed to move in a particular way to a backing track. For my group, which we named ‘_Underscore_’, we decided to do something different and challenging, so we created multiple robots that could respond to MIDI signals to play musical instruments (hence the name ‘_Underscore_’ that has both musical and computer connotations).
We used a selection of instruments - drums, ukulele, percussion & synth - each with an Arduino that we programmed to play them. We had a range of short excerpts from four songs that can be heard in the YouTube link below. In the end, we placed first in the Senior Theatre! We would like to thank Chris for the many hours that he spent sharing his expertise with us.
Here is a link to what our robots performed at nationals: https://youtu.be/aKr5ToT69k8
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