Two 13-year-old Brisbane students have done Australia proud at the World Robotic Olympiad in Central America held earlier this month.
Liam Nitschke and Tiernan Martin took part in the international competition in Costa Rica, which attracted 45 teams from around the world.
The boys designed and programmed two robots that competed in an autonomous soccer tournament.
The World Robotic Olympiad (WRO) is an international competition that brings together young people from all over the world to develop their creativity, design and problem-solving skills through challenging and educational robot competitions.
Teams with participants aged between 8-25 years, create, design and build a robot that competes in one of four competition categories.
Each team must qualify through national competitions that attract more than 60,000 competitors from 59 countries.
Infra-red ball
Then 1,000 of the highest achievers go on to represent their country in the WRO, held in November each year.
Liam and Tiernan are both from Brisbane’s Kelvin Grove State College Robotics Team.
They competed in the WRO Football category in team H010n0m1c, coached by Nick Martin, Liam’s step-father.
The exciting robot soccer match requires students to design and program two robots to compete against an opposing pair of robots by kicking an infra-red ball into the opposing team’s goal.
Team H010n0m1c won the 2016 Australian national competition, earning their place as one of three teams representing Australia at WRO Costa Rica 2017.
Breaking down stereotypes
Liam and Tiernan, with their families supporting them, joined two other Australian teams travelling from Perth, to represent Australia in this challenging competition.
“I learnt so much from being at an international event with amazing competitors from all over the world,” said Liam. “International competitions like this one bring people together and break down stereotypes.”
Teams had two hours to build their robots and then compete in qualifying rounds to earn their team a place in the elimination matches.
All three Australian teams qualified to play in the first round of the finals. Team H010n0m1c played against a team from China in the Top 32 elimination match and won 5 to 1.
Equal highest ranking
Unfortunately, the other two Australian teams were eliminated in this stage. Team H010n0m1c then played against a local team from Costa Rica and although they put up a hard fight, they lost 4-6.
They finished the tournament in 9th place, the equal highest ranking Australia has had in the competition.
Two teams from Taiwan took 1st and 2nd place, a Russian team took 3rd place.
Team H010n0m1c has qualified in the 2017 Australian national competition to compete again in the WRO 2018 competition in Chang Mai, Thailand in November 2018.
And Liam and Tiernan are already planning the refinements to their robots.
“This is my first international competition and I am amazed at the many ways the teams have built a robot capable of playing soccer at this level,” said Tiernan.
