It’s not every day a robot earns a trip to Texas, but a Tasmanian robot has won its team of teenage creators a trip to the First Tech Challenge (FTC) world championships in Houston.
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Metal Minds Robotics is one of just three Australian teams who are preparing to pack up their handmade robot and put it to the test against more than 60 international teams.
Scoring an innovation award in the Australian national championships, the group is now on a fundraising mission of $22,000 to make it to Texas in April.
“We competed at the national championships in December and they won the innovation award for … a particular element they’d not seen before at nationals, and that’s what got us to the world championships,” mentor Jonathan Heathcote said.
“Now they’ve got six weeks or thereabouts to improve their design … because world championships are very different to national championships.
“It’s all collaborative.”
The Metal Minds robot will be put through its paces identifying and removing different coloured objects, as well as picking up and relocating foam blocks from the centre of the competition arena into the appropriate holders.
A final task will be picking up a particularly complicated ‘relic’, a yellow block weighted at the top to make it more challenging, and placing it outside the limits of the arena on a selected marker.
All of this will be on a strict timer.
The Metal Minds robot was created by a team including Hayden Walmsley, Malachi Capela, Oscar Kinman and Nihad Mohamad, and operates off an Android phone coded by chief programmer Malachi.
“It has an arm that can stretch out and pick up stuff like the glyphs and relics,” team member Hayden said.
The First Tech Challenge gives each team only six weeks to create a new robot that can successfully complete a new competition task.
“We pretty much had a wheel-base already done that we could put parts and the top on that we needed to,” Oscar said.
“And then when we find out about what the objective is, what we need to do to try and win and score points, we have to base our ideas around that.”
The Metal Minds team was originally founded by Harry Heathcote when, as a teenager: now he and Jon Heathcote are mentors to the 14-18 year team of equally robotically-inclined creators.
With a $22,000 fundraising bill ahead of them, the team has committed the $1000 non-refundable deposit to make it to the world championships, and is hoping sponorship and community support will take the Metal Minds robot to Texas in April.
“It’ll be good to be able to go and get experience,” Hayden said.
- metalmindsrobotics.com