Young designer takes robots into battle

Stepping into the world of robot wars and bits and bytes has taught Joshua Hurley new skills and ways of thinking.

The 15-year-old is part of a strong robotics club at St Peter’s College in Palmerston North, which gets together in lunchtimes and compete in scrimmage battles in weekends and holidays.

Last year, Joshua was part of the winning regional team for the VEX EDR robotics series, earning them a place in the national finals in Auckland.

The competition challenged them to build a robot to throw objects, earning points for how many went over a fence, and extra if they went further.

‘‘At the start we had a robot that could throw further, but could only do one or two stars, but the next one we built, we could do two cubes and three stars .

‘‘After the qualification round we were coming fourth, then in the quarter-finals we won the first game, then ended up losing the next two rounds because our robot stopped halfway through. It was heartbreaking.’’

The team were never able to find what went wrong frustratingly the robot ran fine when they tried it off the field. But Joshua said there was lots they learned about how to make it better and faster.

Learning new skills, problemsolving and teamwork to tackle problems has been fun, he said.

‘‘There’s quite a bit of variety... which design, which gearing ratio, whether you want it fast or strong.

‘‘Competing has helped with being able to actually think about design before actually doing it.’’

This year Joshua’s team, Hilarius, is back in scrimmage competition, leading up to the regional VEX EDR competition in September.