The Red River offices were the base for a Student Robotics Tech Day last weekend.

Student Robotics is a charity which runs an annual robotics competition for 16-19 year olds.
Teams have six months to design, build, and test a fully autonomous robot before competing in the final competition over a two day weekend.

At the tech day we had two teams, Westminster City College (WMC) and Hazelwick School (HZW) come along to spend a full day hacking on their robots.

This was our first Tech Day of the year and teams had only had their kits for two weeks beforehand (with one of those weeks being half term) so it was still very early days.

WMC used the day to plan their strategy and start thinking about their robot’s design as well as becoming familiar with the simulator we provide to teams to test their code virtually.

HZW had built a chassis on the Friday before the Tech Day and used the day to get their chassis moving and start working on implementing vision so they can detect the fiducial markers (basically QR codes) we put on the game props and around the arena.

WMC brought ten competitors, HZW had two competitors.
There were six blueshirts (Student Robotics volunteers) including Muhie who was a competitor last year with Collyer’s and part of the team we sponsored when they went to Switzerland to represent the UK (second from left in https://river.red/robotics-olympics-style/).

Chatting to the WMC supervisor they mentioned Student Robotics was great for some of their competitors as they had applied for the Computer Science A Level at the college but there wasn’t space on the course for them, by doing Student Robotics they were still able to get exposure and experience to computer science and engineering.