Ready for robot challenge
Four Taranaki robotic enthusiasts are heading back to America to compete at the ‘Olympics of Robotics’.
For the fourth year in a row the New Plymouth-based Nakibots will travel to the USA in April to represent New Zealand and put their robots to the test against 2000 other teams at the world championships.
‘‘It’s a competition where you have to build a robot and then use it to score as many points as you can on this field in one minute,’’ Conor Eager, 13, said.
The New Plymouth Boys’ High student, along with Francis Douglas Memorial College teammate Tim Thykowalewski, 14, will travel with Riley Pollard, 11, of Rahotu School and Tara Stevens, 14, of Sacred Heart Girls’ College.
The group have programmed their robots to earn points by picking up plastic tumblers and moving them to a blue square in under one minute. Each orange tumbler is worth one point and the yellow one is worth two points.
Eager said things often went wrong when building and programming the robots from a kit.
‘‘To get to the final design and start tweaking it was probably a few months,’’ Eager said.
‘‘You’re just constantly tweaking it. We didn’t have a final design until a few days before the national competition,’’ Stevens added.
Stevens and Pollard, who call themselves the ‘girl-powered’ team in the Nakibots, have never been to the USA before so were excited tocompete in a competition considered to be more of a boy’s activity.
‘‘I guess I’ve never been a girl that does all the girl stuff. I prefer a lot of things that boys do that girls often don’t get to do,’’ Stevens said.
The teams will be spending their summer tweaking the robots ahead of their world championship debut in April.