On May 25th and May 29th, Mr. Leo and the High School Programming and Robotics elective held a sumo battle among robots made and programmed by the students. Through 45 battles, they determined a final winner.
After 3 weeks building their robots using Lego Mindstorm pieces, the students prepared their robots to fight against each other. The robots were programmed with a motion activated sensor that as soon as it activated it would immediately go towards its opponent, and a color sensor that attempts to stay on black, recognizing when it approaches the white of the edge of the table and attempting to fight back. The students put a lot of effort into building their robots, they dedicated many classes to this competition and their enthusiasm was evident during the competition.
The competition kicked off with a group phase, where two groups of 5 played each other for the first two places in each group, which would then go off into the semi-finals. After weeks of work spirits were high as the students cheered each of their robots and the event was live streamed on YouTube. The robots were lined on a table in the edge of the room and a circular table in the center made for the robot’s sensors were used as the sumo ring, as the first robot to have both wheels off center or fall off the table loses. The results were kept in a spreadsheet that counted all the winners and losers, and accumulated the points: three for winning, 1 for tying and 0 for losing. Students accompanied the battles and the spreadsheet attently in the group phase, cheering themselves and friends on.
The 4 robots who moved on to the semi-finals then went head to head for a best of three battle to determine who would move onto the finals. At the semis the student named ADAM and Secret Weapon robots went against each other and ADAM passed in just 2 rounds. On the other side of the bracket, the kleber and D4N D4N bots went head to head and Kleber ultimately passed forwards. This left Secret Weapon and D4N D4N to battle it out for third place in a battle won by D4N D4N.
At the final, Kleber vs ADAM went for a best of three in a very fierce dispute. The first two rounds ended in a tie and in order to have a final winner the third round would go all the way until someone’s victory. The third round was very fierce as well, however Kleber in a maneuver pushed ADAM out of the black surface.
All in all, the students had a fun competition and learned how to program sensors and movements in their personally customized creative robots. Each one had their own strategy such as either breaking the balance of the opponent by lifting them up, tricking the opponent’s sensors or attaching pieces and tools to the robot to increase its size or strength. Beyond entertaining, it also concluded with a nice final project and final checklist, as students reflected on their programming and robots and congratulated each other.
EAC PRESS 