Botball competition: Robot face-off

They call it ‘Gutsy’ and perhaps quite rightly. It’s smart and it looks very determined as it goes about its job, which is performing deft manoeuvres and picking up small objects.

But ‘Gutsy’ will have to do more than just that on Saturday when it’s pitted against other robots on a playing field the size of a ping-pong table in the high-energy, non-destructive Botball (see box) tournament.

For hosts Dubai American Academy to have a real chance of winning, the institute’s American robotics instructor Tony Deprato reckons they will need their little creation to pull out all the tricks it has learnt and a few more. "I reckon the odds of our winning the competition is 1:3," he said.

However, the Academy’s students Asif, Shahriar, Dylan, Esther, Gaurav and Vidya are optimistic that ‘Gutsy’ and ‘Wayne’, the two Lego©Mindstorm robots they have built and programmed for the competition, will do well when they take on robots developed by their counterparts at other schools in the country.

Besides Dubai American Academy, teams from four other schools – Al Mawakeb, Al Barsha, Garhoud International School of Arts & Sciences and the American Community School, Abu Dhabi – will participate in the tournament which is hosted by Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar.

Each student team has been equipped with a Lego ©Mindstorm robot along with instructions on how to programme it to move autonomously.

The top two teams from the UAE will go on to compete in the regional final on May 24 in Doha where they will square off against the top two teams from Botball competitions in Qatar, Kuwait and Egypt.

The winning team of the Doha event will get to travel to Norman, Oklahoma, USA to attend the 2008 Global Conference on Educational Robotics and meet middle school and high school students, educators, robotic enthusiasts and professionals from all over the world.

What is botball

The Botball programme was developed in the US by the KISS Institute for Practical Robotics (KIPR) in 1993. The idea is to get students interested in the fields of science, information and engineering by getting them to design and programme an autonomous robot.

Botball participants compete against each other on a 4X8 playing field in a fast-paced non-destructive tournament.

Robots score points by placing ping pong balls in a scoring position.