Robotics Rumble
Lauren Sanders 7O, writes:
On Friday 22nd June Stanborough’s new Robotics team visited MBDA in Stevenage to compete in the launch event for the annual Robot Rumble Competition.
We had a great time building our robot. When we arrived there was a presentation on the judging scheme, the build and the main event; it sounded so fun. After that we started to build our robot; there were technical challenges with the coding but we got through them. Then we started to properly build the robot. After careful planning we had finally designed the perfect robot, it was light but had a good centre of gravity, the friction and grip of the wheels worked well with the weight and height of the robot. We used an elastic band to organise the cables. There were lots of fiddly parts so we had to use the spanners and Allen keys.
We spent a lot of time getting the right wheels, eventually choosing the medium sized wheels with good friction levels so we could hit the balls into the goal at the end of the coned course (a World Cup theme, of course!). When it was finally time to have our first try at getting around the course it went well but we crashed into a few cones which deducted some seconds off our final time. After our first try we had lunch and got ready for our 2nd try, we also made a mini replica of the course to test on. On the second go we had almost no mistakes but just before we went to go to the track one of our wheels loosened so we had to do a quick repair. After the 2nd try we managed to beat our time and we scored all three goals and didn’t hit any cones. Our final time was 7 seconds, a great score! On the leader board we finished in 5th place, a really good place! Thank you to our amazing mentor, Daniel, we couldn’t have done it without you! It was a really fun day, mostly because we worked as a team and had an amazing time.
“It was a great experience, I enjoyed it all and had an amazing time.” Isabel Verlander (7O)
“I learnt about torque (engineering).” Harry Beale (8B)
“My favourite part was building the robot because it was exciting and we had to think outside the box.” Eliezer Lagman (7BM)
“I was so impressed with our new robotics team, they showed excellent communication and team working skills! I look forward to seeing how they do in the next two events.” Mr Benzid
