Another year, another successful VEX Nationals. Last weekend, a few dozen volunteers, 70 high school teams and hundreds of students, staff and parents took over the Massey University Recreation Centre in Albany for the annual national competition. This is the event many teams have been working all year towards, attending the scrimmages supported by our dedicated AURA volunteers, spending time …
AURA’s Battlebots 2016 Application
As a competitive robotics club, AURA always gets asked “Do you building fighting robots??”. Usually the answer is no, however late last year we had the opportunity to design a Battlebot and apply to be on the rebooted ABC show. The robot we designed, Mango is a ring spinner. Mango would have weighed 115kg, and the outer ring would have …
Robogals / AURA joint workshop
Thanks Robogals Auckland for inviting us to an awesome robotics workshop at Auckland Girls’ Grammar School. Lots of our members turned out to assist the Robogals, so the kids could have a great time learning with Lego Mindstorms robot kits. Thank you to Robogals president Sweta and to our volunteers: Oliver, Jack, Jess, Barney, Ellen and Karan. Check out the …
Auckland Kiwi Challenge season “Missile Mania” concludes
This weekend volunteers from AURA ran the 2015 Auckland Kiwi Challenge regional competition at Unitec Albany. This was the final event of the Kiwi Challenge season, which included three other scrimmages (also run by AURA volunteers) over the last two months. All 34 teams did well. These videos show the elimination matches:
Nothing but Net ball trajectory equations with air resistance
Recently, Nathan made a launching speed calculator which calculates the speed and/or angle required to score a ball from any position on the field in Nothing but Net. The theoretical basis behind this calculator is the Drag Equation: This makes the equations more complex than if air resistance was ignored or if air resistance was assumed to be proportional to …
AURA’s 2015 design notebook
We have now released our design notebook for the 2015 season. You can read it here: https://www.aura.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2015AuraNotebook.pdf
AURA returns triumphant from Louisville
AURA won three out of four World Champion titles at the Vex U World Champs – the Programming Skills Challenge, the Robot Skills Challenge, and the Excellence Award. This is the best possible result without winning the finals, and the most World Champion titles in one year by any team (tied with OYES last year). In the tournament we went …
AURA’s trip to Worlds in Kentucky
Four members of AURA left New Zealand on April 10 to travel to Kentucky for the Vex U World Champs. The days before the competition were filled with interesting activities including visiting the Kentucky Speedway NASCAR track, eating American food, and testing our robots’ autonomous routines in our hotel room. The start of the competition gave us a chance to …
AURA’s 2015 Vex U reveal video
This video shows the robots we used at the 2015 Vex U world champs in Kentucky. Music credit: Macklemore, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, and especially Robonauts team 118.
How to do a “Good Turn”?
I was pretty humbled today, when I was contacted with a question. I wrote quite a long answer, so I thought I’d share a little of what I’ve learnt over the past 7 years of Vex programming with you all. How do you do a ‘good’ turn? Well, this is basically the only question when it comes to programming robots. …