Middlesex win Innovation Award at robotics competition final hosted in France

Middlesex University’s robotics team, Brainstorm, were given a special prize for innovation at the Eurobot 2019 finals.

The task was to programme a robot which could identify and pick up different coloured picks without bumping into other robots in the process. While they did not win the overall competition, the judges had high praise for the innovative use of a robot operating system as opposed to traditional programming language. Further standouts were a powerful Latte Panda circuit board and a single pull cord system to wirelessly control the competing robots.

The competition was vast with over 200 teams competing from institutions throughout the world. Brainstorm were identified as one of the few institutions who allows students to compete in the competition outside of their academic course. Alongside this award, Brainstorm managed to place in the top 20 teams at the end of the competition.

Brainstorm stated that they were able to benefit from the competition despite not winning overall.

The team were able to obtain high value sponsorships from Rapid Electronics and Maxon Motor, which will enable them to complete higher quality work for future competitions. They hope that it will also provide a pulling factor for bringing new Middlesex students into the fold, which will enable the passing of the torch for future competition strategies.

The team have stated that they believe it was the combination of students with various backgrounds, including computer science and robots, which enabled them to win this recent prize.

Michael Heeney, Technical Tutor of Physical Computing at Middlesex University and a Eurobot committee member, commented on the team’s “fantastic departmental and collaborative effort” and “novel uses of technology” which contributed to their success in the competition and played a large part in the decision to award them this prize.

Middlesex University is not only a competitor in the Eurobot competition but is also acting as Official National Organizing Committee and, in April 2019, hosted the UK Eurobot Finals.

Middlesex University’s Brainstorm team consisted of six students: Artur Graczyk, Camille Croci, Chibuike Okpaluba, Muhammad Ali Hussain Javed, Szymon Klimek and Szymon Malecki.