Robotics Sumo Wrestling Competition

Last month, the Robotics Club capped a year-long progression to an in-school competition, splitting up into teams to build rather sophisticated “sumo” robots to combat one another in a nod to Japan’s national sport. Equipped with laser sensors and designed to detect an “opponent,” the robots could charge each other in single combat and were even able to read color differences in the floor surface so as to avoid crossing the boundary lines of the competition surface.
Using new blocks-based coding developed or remote learning in response to the pandemic by VEX Robotics—the governing body for interscholastic bot competition in a normal year—teams could work at home to develop their algorithms.
“It really made programming more accessible,” says Robotics Team moderator Lisa Standring. “It was really a virtual playground of software development. There was a lot of collaboration amongst our teams as well.”