This fall, the Robotics Club divided into teams to build “Sumo” Robots. The process of designing, building, and programming was a group effort and culminated in our Sumo Robot Competition on March 2 in the Clay Science Centre. With a core group of 8 students and numerous friends, our robots represent over 120 engineer-hours while building, troubleshooting, programming, and debugging.
– Chuck McDonald, Robotics teacher
Team 1 (L-R): Will Noland, Jake Shusterman, Alex Bernsten and Jivan Purutyan
Team 2 (L-R): Jake Camel, Joe Feeny, Kelly Finke and Juliette Bendheim.
The game is played on a 10ft by 8ft arena marked out with blue tape. Each team has a starting zone and a scoring zone. During a 3 minute round, each team tries to plow bean-bags into their scoring zone, push bean-bags out of their opponent’s scoring zone and, ultimately push the opponent’s robot out of the arena. Grean bean bags are worth 1 point each, the special Gold bean bag is worth 3 points and pushing your oponent clear of the arena is worth 5 points.
Team 2’s Robot, “Sheldon”, proved to be a powerful bulldozer and won one match by scooping up the other robot and pushing it out.
Team 1’s Robot, “Clawbot”, has a more aggressive profile and attempts to lock down the oposing robot in addition to pushing it out of the arena.
Here, robots battle over beanbags and the all-important Gold Bag.
Sheldon wins by clearing the opponent’s goal zone and up-ending the opponent’s robot, evicting him from the arena.
