After months of preparation and hundreds of hours in the lab, the Robotics Group at the Université de Moncton are just weeks away from the 2023 Eurobot competition in France.
The team is taking not one, but two robots in the hopes of winning the 30th edition of the competition.
“We’re kind of in a mix of stages for both of the robots,” explained vice president, Matthew Arsenault.
“So the first one, right now, we’re assembling the mechanical side and the electric together, and then for the second robot that we have we’re still more in the designing phase.”
While the robots won’t have a mission on Mars, they will still have a very important job.
The theme this year is “The Cherry on the Cake” and each machine has to preform a very specific task.
“There are different, we call them the pucks, but they’re layers of the cake and we need to go pick them up and put them in a specific order,” said president, Myriam Paquet.
“They’re also balls around the playing field and we need to pick up the balls and then build the cakes, so for every cake that we build, we get more points. We’re also allowed to go and steal cakes from other teams, so they added a bit of that competitive aspect.”
Paquet says there are other ways to collect points too, like putting extra balls, also known as cherries, into a basket or guessing correctly how many points you’ll be able to get each round.
While the group had a choice of taking one robot or two, they opted for the extra challenge, hoping it will give them an edge during the competition.
“It lets you really customize your strategy that you have once you’re in Europe,” said Arsenault.
“We can really have a couple of set jobs for one robot and set ones for the other one and it’s a great way to do the competition very efficiently because we only have 100 seconds to do the round, so we have to make sure we’re getting as much as we can within those 100 seconds.”
This year is the first Eurobot competition since 2019 and the first time that both Arsenault and Paquet have the chance to go.
A GoFundMe fundraiser has made it possible to bring four extra members this year, meaning a team of 11 will represent Canada from May 17 to May 20.
“At this point, we really want to perfect everything, so all of our mechanical concepts, we need to make sure that they work and that they’re reliable and that pretty much every time we start it, it’s going to work,” said Paquet.
The robotics club was formed in 2015 and has continued on as students work towards the chance to compete internationally.
“[The club] allows us, especially myself in the engineering side, to really put what I learn in my classes to the test and really to do as best I can to learn even more too,” said Arsenault.
“It’s a great way to see something in class and then you can take it here and you can put it to the test.”
While the experience of competing in France is already a big accomplishment for the group, bringing home the win really would be the cherry on the cake.
