A TEAM of hinterland bright minds have won the RoboCup Junior State Championships in Queensland for an ant robot creation they called ‘Ant-elligence’ .
Over the course of a few months, Glasshouse Christian College year six students Sean, Isaac, Byron and Jacob coded, built and worked through a number of prototypes using a Lego Spike Prime kit, before deciding on the final design.
‘Ant-elligence’ can crawl, manoeuvre left and right, as well as turn away from obstacles on it’s own, thanks to sensors the team installed in the robot.
The competition’s aim is for children to flex their building and coding skills to develop a robotic creature, and showoff its animalistic features in a short movie to win.
Sean said the process was part of the fun with the team working well together.
“The person who helped me the most with the designing of the actual robot was probably Isaac. He helped build the mandibles and stabilise the legs, and he actually did quite a lot of the design work,” Sean said.
“Byron helped with everything; including the presentation, the movie, also with the coding and design as well.
“He helped build the legs and then Jacob did most of the movie and an outline of the code.”
“Our teacher Jasmine Bautista helped and supported us by showing us a lot of tutorials to help us code, and we took inspiration from one of the tutorials.”
Sean said it was a great feeling to get first place.
“We had no idea! We thought we would have come fourth or fifth or something but instead we came first, and we were really excited that we won,” he said.
“I love learning about what makes robots work, and seeing if we can advance them a little bit more, that was probably my most favourite part about it.
“I liked coding the robot as well and I would like to keep building robots when I finish school.”
Although the team exceeded their own expectations, Sean said there were a few speed-bumps the team had to overcome to get the perfect design.
“I think getting the legs to work on our robot was one of the trickiest things we had to do, another tricky part was getting the mandibles to work,” he said.
“It took us over two weeks to find out the perfect design for the mandibles, at first it looked more like a spider and it wasn’t very stable so we changed it again to make it perfect.”
The team won a LEGO Spike Prime kit which the school is currently holding onto, but Sean said the team will likely build another robot with the kit this year.