AURA has had a very strong first 10 months. Starting with our inception in January with about 20 members, we started a club with the aim of creating a team for the Vex Robotics Competition at the University of Auckland. With a number of veterans with high school experience in the competition and a couple of new faces, we worked through several months of hard work to get to the World Championships in Orlando, Florida. We had a great success at our first major competition, being ranked second after qualifications, being nominated for a number of top awards, and bringing home the Judges’ award. We also had a great trip with our team members, spending time in Orlando and San Francisco.
On our return, we set up our mentoring programme, which now features seven schools from the Auckland region. Our members have volunteered at official and informal Kiwibots scrimmages throughout the last couple of months, keeping the competition running and providing valuable training opportunities for high school students. We have also appeared at numerous publicity events, including the Rotary Science Forum and the University of Auckland Careers and Courses Day, which have allowed us to show off our robots and encourage more students to get into science and engineering. We also ran a recruitment drive to bring in some new members, and ran a series of workshops to provide first-hand experience for new members. Our club has now expanded to 50 students, of which at least half have encountered Vex for the first time this year. We have also continued to remain an open organisation that encourages students from all backgrounds to join, and we have a number of members who are not studying Engineering contributing to the team.
We have formed an electronics research team and a mechanics research team to further develop new experimental projects that could become part of our competition robots, with the eventual goal of contributing towards research papers and postgraduate research. Additionally, we have been designing and building our own robots to compete in both the World Cup and World Championships for Gateway. We achieved a very credible third placing at the World Cup last week, exceeding our own expectations, and are now looking to improve upon last season’s result at the World Championships. Finally, throughout the year we have acted as a social organisation for our members as well, from sharing meals together on late build nights to Laserforce and LAN nights.
Coming up, we are preparing for competition at the World Championships, as well as preparing our mentored teams to compete at scrimmages, qualify at Nationals, and succeed at World Champs. Initial planning has started for a trip to take approximately 16 students to the US for the competition. We are hosting our first high school scrimmage at the University of Auckland on December the 10th, which promises to be an exciting day of both competition and fun. We have made the first steps in our humanoid robot project, with initial CAD work and negotiations with faculty staff members. There is a project over the summer to develop an assignment which integrates Vex Robotics into the MECHENG 223 course. The electronics and mechanics research teams will be producing tangible results that will be implemented on our competition robots. We will also be continuing our current PR efforts, and hopefully securing some sponsorship to see us through to World Champs in April 2012.
We did a lot of work in our first year, setting up a team structure that will last. We have been through three sets of negotiations with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department for funds to purchase robotics parts, which have been successful and we are grateful to the department for supporting our organisation. We have a strong presence online, with our website, our photo and video sharing systems, our numerous communication channels, and actively posting on vex forums, which has also contributed to our international reputation as a strong robotics team. We have done some initial fundraising work, and starting building relationships with companies so that we can get funding for parts and trips in the future. I feel that we have set up a very strong foundation for future years, and we are in a very good position to compete well and further support the growth of engineering and robotics. I’d like to thank all of our members for all their contributions to the team; without our team members, our club is nothing, but drawing from a wide variety of skills and experience has led us much further than I had ever expected when we first started this club back in January. I sincerely hope that we will be able to see this club continue to exceed expectations well into the future.