By Kim Choe
A group of New Zealand teenagers has won the World Robotics Championships in Dallas – a NASA-sponsored competition of complex engineering and computer programming.
It was sheer determination that saw their inventions beat hundreds of others in the battle of the 'bots.
It was brains rather than physical strength that gained them the title of World Robotics Champions – two New Zealand teams, Free Range Robots and K-Force, combined with a Chinese team to win the grand final of a game called Clean Sweep.
“The object is to get as many balls onto the other side of the wall and then you've got triangle goals that you can score in. But you really want got to get all the balls from your side to their side,” says robot designer Max Waller.
If that sounds complicated, it's nothing compared to the months of planning it took for the budding engineers and computer programmers.
“We were just at Massey University all day, every day from about nine in the morning till sometimes eight at night. So we were just building, programming, practising, getting ready for the worlds,” Mr Waller says.
Robot programmer Richard Paul says he spent hundred of hours programming the robot.
The teenagers are gifted, disciplined, and focused – and it's clear they have bright futures ahead of them.
“There's a lot of opportunities opened out for these guys,” says team coach John Waller.
“Massey uni are right behind the whole scheme and they can see that there's pathways that are now available for them to move through the engineering fields – being scientists and rocket engineers and all that sort of thing that lots of us dream about.”
But there's no time for dreaming – they're going straight back to the lab to begin preparing for next year's world champs.
3 News