Dalton News

Dalton Robotics Students Take Second Place at Robocup Jr. National Competition

In just their first year competing in Robocup Jr., the Dalton robotics team came in second place in the robotic soccer competition.  In case you don’t know the rules, Robot Soccer is a game played by two opposing teams, each with two autonomous robots.  These robots chase a special baseball-sized soccer ball which emits an infrared signal.
The Dalton team has been busy preparing for this competition since the fall.  After spending a few years working with Lego robots in the FLL competition, these ambitious 7th and 8th grade students chose a new and more challenging engineering path, spending the first part of the year learning the Arduino programming language and basic electronics.  After returning from winter recess, they worked at breakneck speed to build their robots from the microcontroller on up.
 
With months of hard work behind them, Dalton started the competition in a blaze--their robot goalie had a short circuit and went up in smoke just before the first round!  Fortunately, their striker robot was so effective that it served as both attacker and goalie.  They were consistently able to locate the ball, and they had the only robot in the competition that was able to kick the ball all the way across the field!  In the championship round, the Tigers tied the score at the end of two 10-minute regulation periods.  The game went into sudden death overtime, and they lost in a very dramatic final shot.  
They are already beginning to think about how they can improve their robot for next year’s ‘football’ showdown.  Better yet, there is even a chance that they could be invited to this year’s Robocup World Championships in the Netherlands, if their performance this past weekend earned them an invitation of course.  We’ll just have to wait and see.
Here are the specifications for this impressive robot:  
  • An Arduino Mega microcontroller with three dc motors
  • An awesome array of six custom-built infrared sensors which successfully read the ball’s unique modulated infrared bursts
  • An ultrasonic sensor to know when the robot is in possession of the ball
  • An accelerometer / magnetometer to find the goal
  • A powerful 125 watt solenoid actuator and accompanying circuitry to kick the ball
This was the exciting end to a full season of competitive robotics at Dalton that included almost 200 student engineers in the middle and high school.

Story contributors, Chad Gallant, Rob Quatrone and Charles Forster
Photos by Jamie Watts and Hilary Addington
Video footage by Jamie Watts 
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