The 2012 New Zealand VEX Robotics National Championship has officially begun! A total of 50 teams from all around New Zealand have travelled to the Telstra Clear Pacific Events Centre in Auckland to compete in the 4th Nationals competition.
The day started with the opening ceremony where AURA was presented with the Autodesk Inventor Digital Prototyping Challenge Award. Our Chairperson, Andrew Chen, was also presented the Volunteer of the Year Award, acknowledging his continued hard work within the New Zealand robotics community.
Following the opening ceremony, we were straight into the qualification matches. With a large team of very efficient volunteers, the day ran extremely smoothly. Teams were queued promptly, fields were reset in world-record time – the scorers, referees, field managers and commentators, all ran a well-oiled machine.
Matches were fiercely fought as a combination of veteran teams with worlds experience mixed in with new teams who have attended NZ Nationals as their first Vex competition ever. A lot of robots fell over, but no DQs were handed out as teams played fairly and within the rules. At the end of the day, a number of teams rose to the top of the leaderboard, having played 8 or 9 of their total matches out of 13 each. These included 720p (aMax), 2921 (Free Range Robotics), 2915B (Lynfield Robotics), 2918D (GC/EC from Glenfield College), and a number of others.
As usual, the Skills Challenges Field was a little quiet, but tomorrow, teams will no doubt be making use of their last opportunity to qualify for the 2012 VEX World Robotics Championship through the Programming Skills and Robot Skills Challenges. We have seen some impressive skills runs and no doubt, the robotics community will be keeping an eye out for how high the Kiwis raise the bar!
We look forward to another day of competitive robotics tomorrow and if you would like to follow the action, the day will be streamed live on http://vexrobotics.co.nz/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=32&Itemid=35 – alternatively, join us at the TelstraClear Pacific Events Center from 9am-5pm! It promises to be an exciting day, with 50 more qualification matches, alliance selection, elimination rounds, and a college challenge all awaiting us.