UBRobotics is a student society formed in February 2015 with the key objective of providing a forum for students to engage in robotic projects of their interest and to develop their skills in all aspects of robotics. Every year the society competes in the annual Eurobot competition (with a chance to enter its international finals)
The Club provides students in the School of Engineering with the unique opportunity to learn and apply skills in the design and programming of robots in a friendly, co-operative environment. Club members will learn to code in Arduino, C++ and PIC along with other languages that are not yet covered in the degree programme, and will be able to take these valuable techniques directly to industry.
The Club encourages students to take up robotics a specialism and thus we have begun organising trips for members to tour factories of robotics companies. Some members are now basing their final year projects in robotics in the hope of eventually collaborating in industry.
Within 2 months of the Club’s inception we prepared a robot and participated in the 2015 Eurobot UK Finals at Middlesex University in London. Incredibly we brought home the 3rd place trophy and £100 in our first attempt, beating teams from Southampton and Middlesex just to name a few!
The Club benefits from the advice and expertise of Mechanical Engineering academic staff. We would like to thank Dr. Mozafar Saadat for his mentoring, as well as Professor Duc Pham and Dr. Marco Castellani for their valuable contributions and support to the Club.
Since November the UBRobotics team has been hard at work preparing for this year’s Eurobot UK Finals which are due to start on the 21 April 2016. The theme of this year’s competition is ‘the beach’ where fully autonomous robots must complete tasks such as closing beach huts, constructing sandcastles and going fishing (for acrylic fish of course!) in order to score points against their opponent robots. The top 3 teams from this will then be invited to the Eurobot International Finals held in France later in the year.
We also aim to compete in the Micromouse Competition which is held as part of the Technology Fair this summer at Birmingham City University. Micromouse is an autonomous maze-solving competition where mice-like robots will race against the clock to navigate a 16x16 cell maze in the fastest time.
23February marked the first anniversary of the Robotics Club and was celebrated with plenty of cake and snacks whilst we started to formalise our structure and plans for the next academic year.
We would like to thank Hands Up and the Student Culture Fund for providing generous funding and support for our many plans. We will seize the opportunity to bring home as many prizes as we can for the University of Birmingham!
As well as preparing for competition we are also counting down to the annual EPS Societies’ Awards. After achieving so much in such a short space of time we would love to win one of the prestigious awards on offer. If you are or have been part of UBRobotics, or have enjoyed reading about our activities this year please nominate us!
With very best wishes,
Amir Hajiyavand
Founder of UBRobotics
