As you may know I am on the Western Australian Committee for Robocup Junior Australia. This year the WA State Competition, along with most of the other state competitions and the national competition, were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
As Western Australia was in a good position with no community transmission, it was decided to hold a delayed WA State Competition in November instead of the usual August.
The WA State Competition was held on 13th and 14th November by Scitech in conjunction with the WA Robocup Junior Committee and was a great success. Attendance numbers were down a little, but that was to be expected this year. As head judge for the Rescue Line challenge it fell to me to design the courses for four preliminary rounds (held on Friday) and then the three playoff rounds and three head to head rounds (held on Saturday). I had a lot of fun designing the rounds to get progressively harder, while keeping them a little easier than previous years as many students had not had as much time to work on their robots this year.
We also used a new digital Robocup Junior Competition Management System (RCJ_CMS) to run the Rescue Line and OnStage Performance (formerly Dance) challenges as well as handle team registration. This system is the brain child of Evan Bailey from the Victorian and National Robocup committees and I spent about two months leading up to the competition beta testing the system and giving lots of feedback. Other than a couple of minor hiccups (which were fixed Friday night), the system worked beautifully. It definitely improved the speed and accuracy of the Rescue Line scoring. Thanks to Evan and the team of their great work.
While I won’t give away all the course designs, I did want to show off some photos of the Head to Head courses used for the finals. The design was based on the Head to Head courses used in the 2014 National competition and used 3 interwoven courses that the top three teams would compete on simultaneously to decide the final placings.
Below are the 3 courses taken from a few angles:
Congratulations to all the teams that took part and especially to the winning and place holding teams.
I am pleased that the teams I mentor were able to achieve Second and Third in the Secondary Rescue Line challenge.
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David
This article was originally posted on http://www.winthropdc.com/blog.
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