Purdue’s SigBots robotics club scored yet another victory in the VEX U robotics qualifier at the Purdue Memorial Union on Saturday, earning a spot in the annual VEX Robotics World Championship for the seventh time in a row.
Working on opposite sides of an elimination bracket, they beat 12 away teams from Clemson, Illinois, Michigan State, Northern Kentucky, Valparaiso and others, and won both semifinal rounds for the third time this year before facing off in a three-round final match, ending in a 2-1 win for the BLRS team.The format of this year’s games, titled “Tipping Point,” gives the highest scores to a team that finishes each match with both of their robots balanced on a seesaw, clutching yellow plastic bases supporting branched poles adorned with purple warped rings. The total points earned in a match determines the winner.
Each match has an autonomous phase and a remote-controlled phase. During the autonomous phase, the robots mostly kept to themselves and focused on gathering rings and placing items on their respective platforms. But in the remote-controlled phase, the robots became more aggressive, with one bot ramming and cornering the other team’s bots, buying time for its partner to score points.
The BLRS and BLRS2 teams won first and third place in the final performance ranking, earning 16 and 11 points, respectively. Placement is based on the total number of matches won in the qualifying and elimination rounds.
Purdue also took the top two positions in the single-team version of the game, which ran concurrently with the competitive matches, summing the high scores earned during runs performed under both manual and autonomous control.
BLRS2 came out on top after a total of six runs and earned the Robot Skills Champion award. That and the Tournament Champions award given to BLRS secured both teams a spot in the upcoming World Championship in Dallas. In all, SigBots added three trophies to the display shelves in their laboratory.
After inspecting the robots for size limits and illegal parts and fixing a structural flaw in the walls enclosing the two fields of play, student volunteers directed continual matches in both fields from morning to evening.
The club’s two teams deployed four robots named after “Bob the Builder” characters: Tumbler, Scoop, Muck and Dizzy.
Purdue SigBots president Micah Rassi noted that one of the club’s most important competitive skills is the ability to observe rival robots’ behavior and their own robots’ errors and make adjustments to their programs on the fly.
“We were able to improvise and adapt during the day by observing other teams,” Rassi, a junior in the Polytechnic Institute, said. “That arms race is a core part of the competition.”
Rassi also said robots Muck and Dizzy were paid special attention when developing their independent decision-making capabilities because they will also be competing in the related VEX AI autonomous robotics contest.
Rassi said he’s proud of the club’s performance Saturday, the result of months of trial and error at previous competitions.
“Overall, things have been consistently improving,” he said. “Saturday was a culmination of a lot of hard work.”
The VEX Robotics World Championship will be held at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas from May 3 through 5.