RoboCup Soccer
I’ve represented my school in RoboCup competitions each year since I was 11 years old (RoboCup is an annual international robotics competition proposed and founded in 1996 by a group of university professors). Up until I was 14, I competed under the Rescue League using LEGO Mindstorms kit programmed with the drag-and-drop interface of the Mindstorms software. In Rescue, one must program a robot to follow a black line and navigate obstacles in a course. Since joining the division, I’ve earned a third place and two second place medals, and, on three occasions, was invited to attend the Nationals competition held in Brisbane, Australia. We attended Nationals twice, the first time suffering due to lighting issues and hardware malfunctions. The second attempt was more successful, but, unfortunately, our team was knocked out in the later rounds when the speed of our robot became a limiting factor. I was fascinated by the multitude of ways people approached an identical problem: to follow a line.
In year 9 I competed in the Soccer League for the first time, where two robots must be programmed to navigate a field and kick an infrared-emitting ball into the opposition's goals, all while defending their own. This was a huge step-up in terms of programming, and so I taught myself Python and used it to program a LEGO EV3 brick. I placed second at a state level and was invited to attend the Nationals competition held in Brisbane, but I could not attend.
Challenges
The huge leap in overall complexity from the Rescue to the Soccer league was difficult to overcome. My high school didn’t offer any computer sciences class, and so my only option was to teach myself Python through videos and written tutorials. I built the two soccer robots using school supplies and a Raspberry Pi electronics kit. My maths teacher and I worked through some of the more difficult mathematics involved, such as aiming towards the opposition's goal from any position on the pitch.
Taking the step from Rescue to Soccer league and from interface-based programming to writing code was a huge leap, but I hugely expanded my knowledge and capabilities, and set myself up for 2018's RoboCup competition.
