BBC success at RoboCup International Championships in Bangkok

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Elexon Electronics is proud to have supported the Brisbane Boys’ College (BBC) as major sponsor of its three robotics teams, who recently competed at the Robocup Junior International Championships in Bangkok, Thailand. 

The aspiring robotics professionals well and truly did us proud last month, with all three teams taking out major awards. 

The award ceremony recognised the following results for the BBC teams: 

Team Polarity (David Pelevin, Horton Faint, Scott Kift,
Thomas Cooley) – 1st Place SuperTeam Open Soccer
(Paired with Slovakia and Japan) who are world champions 

Team Epsilon 6 (Rudra Potlapally, Sean Hudson, Liam Crook) –
1st Place SuperTeam Lightweight Soccer (Paired with Germany and Japan) who are now world champions 

Team Epsilon 6 – Outstanding Design Award 

Team Delta (Josh Harris,  Nathan Adams, Hemish Dubey, Ashton Trevor-Roberts) – Excellence in Engineering  Process Award 

“What an amazing 10-day experience for three of our qualified teams  to head over to Bangkok, Thailand and compete in the RoboCup Junior International Championships” BBC Director of Robotics, Nick Barkley, said. 

“The boys demonstrated resilience, tenacity, great team work, and displayed the BBC and Australian spirit through their sportsmanship. Another big thankyou to Elexon Electronics for being a major sponsor of this event with their generous support!” 

 

Junior Robotics State Championships 

As part of the Elexon sponsorship of BBC robotics, we were invited to exhibit at the Junior Robotics State Championships in Brisbane, 13-14 August, which brings together over 800 students across the following three categories at UQ: 

Dance: Where robots are constructed and students perform a choreographed routine with their robots. 

Rescue: Custom-built robots (mostly Lego Mindstorms) must navigate a black track on a white background, where the track can divide into complex patterns and navigate over obstacles such as tilting bridges, to rescue an object and return it to the start. 

Soccer: Two robots from each team attempt to guide a flashing ball into goals.  

Elexon Electronics exhibited across the two-day event, drawing in crowds with an array of in-house technology. 

“Firstly, I would like to offer thanks to Sandra, John and Fisher for helping on the weekend.” Elexon Electronics Director, Leigh Bateman, said. 

“We had setup an Allflex cattle reader and challenged kids to run past it and not make it beep. We had a bed of nails test jig, Titley readers, a short looping video, lollies and various circuit boards in different states of manufacture. Sandra also had a QR code with a web address for students to register work experience/internship interest. We also had our ESD coats so we looked the part!” he said. 

“Saturday was very busy with a continuous stream of curious students, ex-students and parents. I had a chat with some BBC boys in year 10, who had built a custom rescue robot and were using neural network training on wide angle cameras to perform object recognition with much of the code written in c++! It was quite amazing.” 

The Elexon team had a brilliant time across the busy weekend of robotics fun, and we made the following contacts: 

  • BBC senior robotics will try to visit us in October.
  • The UQ mechatronics team who are building an autonomous electric race cart would love to see
    our facility.
  • A parent working on the Brisbane City Council IT infrastructure will put us in touch with their IOT
    team for numerous council monitoring projects. 
  • Micromelon, another exhibitor, who are building
    robots specifically tailored for student education
    (Lego are pulling out of the market) want to visit us.  
  • Nicola Ireland, GM of Robotics Australia Group
    wants to chat further as they work to connect
    tech companies together.  

It just goes to show how vitally important trade shows, events, and expos are for networking!