By Mandy Moraes, NLPS staff
A group of secondary students is showing how hands-on robotics projects can achieve impressive results.
Dover Bay Secondary’s Robotics Club is headed to Toronto to test their engineering and problem-solving skills in a national competition, building robots that can operate automatically (autonomous) or be controlled remotely by humans (tele-operated) onsite.
After a standout performance at provincials earlier this year, the club will represent at the Skills Canada National Competition, held May 28-29.
The competition, revealed at the start of the school year, tasked teams with building robots that could navigate a simulated emergency scenario through a course. Students had to design machines that could enter a hazardous environment, modeled as a damaged, smoke-filled building, to complete a series of rescue and repair tasks.
“We’ve worked on this all year,” said Grade 12 student Haitao Yuan. “We just have to get faster and better at it.”
Dover Bay’s club were last at the skills Canada competition in 2023, and are raring for the come-back.
Thanks to the school’s Parent Advisory Council’s purchase of 3D printers (machines that create three-dimensional objects from digital files), the team can create custom parts they need for the bots in classrooms: two controlled manually with controllers and one autonomous. Each robot has a specific task to complete.
At the provincials, which will be replicated at the nationals but scored at a higher level, one teleoperated robot rescued small mannequins representing people and removed them from the course. It would also “sweep up debris” from the site.
“The other robot would repair the ECU by removing and replacing parts,” said Grade 12 student Thomas Grounds. Precision and careful design were required to remove and replace wooden dowels and boards on the ECU and unlock bolt latches.
“We were one of the only teams that could take all of the old ones, and the only team that could put them back in,” said Grade nine student Cody Croft.
Regionals marked a turning point: the team’s storage system allowed their robot to collect and hold more debris, securing extra points and distinguishing them from the competition.
The students’ ability to complete both tasks set them apart.
Achieving this success required persistence, and students have dedicated weeks after school refining designs and testing robots, fueling their progress.
“Our provincial robots took about a month to build,” Yuan said. “Regionals took longer because we weren’t here as much.”
Instructor Joe Spillman said students often worked after class, sometimes until 7 p.m., to prepare for competitions.
Now, the team prepares for nationals, applying similar concepts with added challenges.
One key difference is the autonomous portion of the national competition, which won’t be revealed until teams arrive. The students are confident in their coding and design skills.
Students are already working with programming languages like C++ and Python (popular coding languages for robotics) to prepare for that uncertainty, building both their coding skills and their ability to adapt quickly. The team is approaching nationals with confidence.
“The club is doing amazing,” said Croft. “We got this thing in the bag.”