Wilsobotics prepares for Eindhoven

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Next week, a team of ten intrepid Year 9, 10 and 11 students will be heading across Europe to compete in the FIRST Tech Challenge Robotics Competition in Eindhoven.

This comes after their success at the National Final in the Copper Box Arena in Stratford earlier this term, where Team Wilsobotics narrowly missed out on a podium finish. In their second season of competing, the goal is to build a robot that can gather "artifacts" from the playing field (15 cm diameter balls) and shoot them into a target, with more points awarded for shooting from further away.

Since the finals in April, the team have been working hard at home to improve the robot whilst also juggling GCSE examinations. One particularly impressive piece of mathematics is that the robot is programmed in such a way that it always knows where it is on the field and in which direction it is travelling, allowing the speed of the shooter to be adjusted accordingly. At its most basic, this requires an understanding of projectile motion, a topic normally studied in Year 13 mathematics. However, I can tell you that what they have produced is far more sophisticated than this and, at one point during their testing process, involved the use of quaternions (four-dimensional complex numbers not usually encountered until the second or third year of a mathematics degree at university!).

Special thanks go to Mr Worth, who has kindly agreed to accompany the students on their journey, and to Mr Elwood, who will be hoping for the best as he drives the robot across Europe in his car!

If you are interested in following the action, you can do so on this website - look out for team 27883: Wilsobotics!