Having existed for almost two years, AURA has built a strong reputation, both in our local community and internationally. A re-organisation of our operations late in 2011 helped us focus our efforts into three key areas: competition, mentoring, and research.
On the competition front, our club has done extremely well – after continuing on from our successes as the Robotics World Cup in October last year, we turned our attention to the VEX Robotics World Championships, where we were able to send a contingent of 10 students to form two complete College Division teams in Anaheim, California. Being our second major competition, our expectations were raised, and we reached the finals of the competition, making our team the second best team in the world. We were additionally nominated for a number of top awards, and also won the Autodesk Digital Prototyping Competition with our humanoid VEX robot, Project Zeta. Our influence was also definitely felt at the competition, with a large number of competitive designs inspired by the work of our team members. We also completed our first engineering design notebook – a weighty document including records of all of our work for the last season. Our team members also enjoyed their trip to Los Angeles and San Diego. We have continued to maintain our presence in the international community, both online and at the World Champs in April.
Throughout this time, we have also continued our mentoring efforts, which now feature 10 schools from the Auckland region, including helping new teams be set up at Baradene College and St. Cuthbert’s College. Our members have also been continuing their efforts at official and informal Kiwibots scrimmages in Auckland and Tauranga, providing scoring, refereeing, and technical expertise, providing crucial practice for the high school teams. We have continued to post material onto our website, Youtube channel, and on VexForum in an effort to help the VEX Robotics community further educate their members. We also ran a holiday workshop for new high school team members, providing valuable experience in mechanics and programming to help raise the standard of competition by new teams in Auckland. Our team has also provided demonstration robots at a variety of public events, including IET’s Premier Lecture Series, the University of Auckland Courses and Careers Day, Auckland Girls Grammar’s technology week, and the ECE Department’s Part IV Exhibition Day, which have given us opportunities to encourage more students to get into science and engineering with hands-on demonstrations. A new recruitment drive at the beginning of the year in orientation week and recently at Courses and Careers Day have helped bring in new members, and our workshops for new team members attracted thirty young engineers.
Our electronics research team have continued with a number of projects, and have completed a number of milestones including a working colour sensor. They are also looking to compete in the RoboNZ competition, using Raspberry Pi and Arduino systems to develop sensor and processing systems that could potentially be used on competition robots. We have successfully begun integrating VEX into the University of Auckland curriculum, with over a hundred students interacting with VEX equipment in the MECHENG 223 Machines and Mechanisms course, which was developed as a Summer Research Scholarship between 2011 and 2012, and helped students learn to deal with uncertainty in the real world. We have also set up an opportunity for an AURA member to receive a Summer Research Scholarship this year, where a humanoid robot for research purposes will be designed and hopefully constructed. Our team has also supported two Part IV projects this year in the ECE department, where we constructed a competition robot for the National Instruments Autonomous Robotics Competition for those students to program with advanced sensors.
Our sponsorship and fundraising team successfully held a quiz night, helping generate crucial funds for the club to buy parts while also providing a good night out for the attendees. They have also continued to provide advertising materials for the club, and been through another two sponsorship rounds, approaching businesses throughout the Auckland region. Finally, throughout the year we have aimed to continue acting as a social organisation for our members as well, including open build nights on Tuesdays, Laserforce, and LAN nights. We have also continued to remain an open organisation that encourages students from all backgrounds to join and refuses to turn away interested members, with a number of members who are not studying Engineering providing important contributions to the team.
Coming up, we will be preparing for the SMC Pneumatics College Competition in Auckland, which will be the de facto College nationals for this season. We are also preparing to volunteer at the Asia-Pacific Robotics Competition, which will also be held in Auckland in December and includes over 160 teams competing from China, Singapore, and New Zealand, making it the largest robotics competition ever held in the Southern Hemisphere. We are also looking at University club affiliation given the changes in clubs management recently. We may also look at hosting our second high school scrimmage at the University of Auckland in January or February to help teams prepare for the National Championships. Unfortunately due to term date clashes it seems unlikely that we will be able to send a team to the VEX Robotics World Championships next year, but there are other opportunities on the horizon including continuing with the National Instruments Autonomous Robotics Competition, and multiple invitations to compete in robotics events in India. We will also be continuing our current PR efforts, and hopefully secure some long-term sponsorship.
We have continued to work hard through this year, and have built a strong team that has the right infrastructure to continue operating in the long-term. We continue to be grateful for the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department here at the University of Auckland, who have provided the majority of our parts and continue to provide our workspace and access to equipment and tools. I’d like to thank all of our members for all their contributions to the team; our club is nothing without our members and all of your contributions are valued. I am stepping down as AURA Chairperson this year, but I am grateful for the experiences that being a part of this club has given me, and would like to thank you all for helping me create a club that has made a positive impact on the community. I think we have successfully exceeded expectations throughout this year, I sincerely hope that we will continue to exceed expectations well into the future.