UBC robot competition demonstrates student skill, perseverance

From penguins to pandas, the rescue mission was on at the University of British Columbia’s Vancouver campus Thursday. (CTV News)

From penguins to pandas, the rescue mission was on at the University of British Columbia’s Vancouver campus Thursday.

Physics-engineering students competed in the annual UBC robot competition, tasked with saving as many stuffed animals as possible from an imaginary fire in a two-minute window.

The robots had to follow a taped path along an obstacle course, and could rescue animals in a variety of ways to score points.

“Going through this course, I just realized how fun it is to apply all the concepts and how it’s just amazing how much you can do and how fast you can learn,” one of the competitors told CTV News between rounds of the contest.

The robots are autonomous, and some have been programmed using artificial intelligence.

Building the robots is an exercise in patience and problem solving, with some students spending as much as 12 hours a day working on their robots in the buildup to the event.

“You have all these different parts, right?” another student said. “And you work really hard to make them work each individually and you’re like, ‘OK, so they all work well, right? This launching mechanism, it works well. The claw, it works well. The driving, it works well.’ And you’re like, ‘OK, surely we’re done right?’ You put them together and you just get a cacophony of issues.”

Some teams incorporated technology similar to that used in self-driving cars – such as reflectance sensors, sonar and infrared – into their robot designs.

Many of the students are expected to go on to careers ranging from quantum computing to spacecraft design.