The event in Quebec City was designed around the theme of a "robot sumo" match, where each team's robot had to push their adversary's robot off the play table. Our very own Mathieu Bélanger-Barrette was one of the judges for the competition.
The teams were using educational robot modules, essentially a small PLC that commands a mechanical system built by the kids. You’ll notice lots of Lego Mindstorms and technic parts in the robots. More than 40 teams were competing, with the winning team making it to the Canadian final in Montreal next week.
We thought this was a great opportunity to show the kids a "real robot"; so we brought a collaborative, UR5, robot with our 2-Finger 85 Adaptive Gripper and FT 300 Force Torque Sensor as a demo. They were also given the chance to learn about programming it! We had a blast observing the kids enthusiasm for robotics and were also impressed by how fast they took to programming it. Makes us wonder: How will these kids will change the robotics world?
Check out some pictures from the event below:
To see how easy it is to program a UR with a Robotiq Gripper read our blog post: Programming a Robot is as Easy as 1-2-3 !