Posted: 10th October 2011

Oxford University's Computer Science Department welcomed school teams of Year 9 and 10 pupils (age 13-15) from UK State schools to the inaugural Oxford RobotGames held on 5^th of October. A film of the event is available here: www.cs.ox.ac.uk/OxfordRobotGames/

This one-day event saw the students attending an introductory lecture on the science behind robots, then designing and building a wheeled robot using Lego Mindstorms, under the guidance of Oxford University staff and students. The teams then pitted  their designs against the Oxford University machines in a robot Olympics-style challenge.

The winner of the event was The John Warner School from Hertfordshire. Congratulations!

The science behind the RobotGames is based around cutting-edge research being carried out at Oxford: two very important (and closely-linked) areas of application are robotic exploration and robotic search-and-rescue. Robotic exploration involves exploration of locations that are hazardous or inaccessible to humans (such as mine fields, contaminated zones, other planets, or underwater environments). Robotic search and rescue is useful since robots may be deployed in dangerous environments without putting human responders at risk.

The academic team at the Department of Computer Science are particularly involved in developing techniques to help a team of robots efficiently map an environment and report on their findings. Many of the same kind of challenges they face — getting robots to balance, remain stable, sense objects — will be explored by teams during the RobotGames.

Further information about the Oxford RobotGames, the video, and information on how to  request places at these events for your school for the December event, is available at www.cs.ox.ac.uk/OxfordRobotGames/