Awesome effort from everyone today – playing through the rest of the pool matches, and then playing through them again, left us still second seeded overall. We played our way through to the semi-finals, where we were knocked out by 2921A and 2915A (Free Range and Lynfield Robotics). After playing in the Bronze Final, we finished third overall, taking home two nice trophies and a lot of badges for our team members. Congratulations to the winners, 720p (aMax) and 2921B (Free Range) – they gain qualification for the World Champs. We’d also like to congratulate Teams 2919A/B (K-Force), Team 2900A (SymbiOHSis), 2915A/B/C (Lynfield Robotics), and 2911A/B (Binary Blitz), our mentored teams who also competed extremely well in the competition, with several of these teams making it to the elimination rounds.
The Robot World Cup has massively raised the exposure of Competitive Robotics in New Zealand, and we are super excited to see lots of new people interested. We will be continuing our mentoring programme, working with schools around Auckland to further interest in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). We would like to thank the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of the University of Auckland, providing space to work over the year as well as paying for our parts! Also thank you to Kiwibots for organising such a massive event, and all of the sponsors for the event. Lastly, big thanks to all the awesome volunteers who made the event run smoothly.
We’ll now be working towards World Champs in Anaheim, CA in April 2012. We’re super excited and have started preliminary strategy planning already!
Photos are available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/aucklandrobotics/tags/2011rwc/
Videos available at http://www.youtube.com/aucklandrobotics