St Gerald’s College, Castlebar, picked up three more robotics prizes last weekend, when students from the school won the second National Mini Sumo Robot Championship in Galway. The Castlebar based school saw off competition from 17 other schools to lift the title. The team of Matthew Moran and Cian Ruane took on a raft of challengers, including a second team from their own school comprising John Dolan and Dara Coll in the final of the competition.
Along with the overall prize St Gerald’s was the winner of the Best Team Robot section and the Film Makers Award on the day. Robot Sumo is a sport where two robots compete to push each other out of a circle. The engineering challenge for the students is to design a robot that will firstly identify its opponent before hunting it down, targeting it and attacking it successfully, surviving all the while. The competition challenges second level students to design, build, and programme robots capable of competing autonomously.
The organiser Declan Askin said: “The key aim of the competition is to develop student interest and expertise in the area of applied control through building autonomous mini sumo robots and subsequently competing them against each other in both school based and national mini sumo robot tournaments.”
