Wilson's Robotics Begin Biobuzz
Last season, both teams reached the final or the Regional Playoffs and were the runners-up of the South East region. Wilsobotics won the Think Award, while Wilsonic Boom received the Reach Award and both teams qualified for the UK National Championship. At the UK Championship, Wilsobotics finished fifth place and earned the opportunity to compete at the European Premier Event in the Netherlands, facing some of the greatest teams and robots in the world. Representing the UK alongside more than 100 teams from over 35 countries, Wilsobotics delivered a strong performance at the event, finishing as part of the fifth-ranked alliance. Meanwhile, Wilsonic Boom made a remarkable debut in their first season and despite being eliminated in the group stage of the UK National Championship, Wilsonic Boom won the Sustain Award.
Our strong results across both teams in this previous season have set a high bar for us to meet, but we have no doubt we can live up to the challenge.
Wilsonic Boom promptly began work on this year’s Biobuzz bot. Our current focus is turning our initial concepts into a cohesive robot that can perform under competition conditions. This season, we are exploring two different approaches: a simpler design that prioritises consistency and reliability, and a more complex version that incorporates advanced mechanisms with a higher ceiling to potentially score more points. By developing both, we can compare their strengths and weaknesses and chose one, aiming to select, build and test our chosen V1 design by December, allowing time for further refinement ahead of competition.
Wilsobotics began work as soon as the season began, and also created two initial designs and are now closing in on our preliminary robot design using Onshape, and plan to begin building next half-term. Although designing such complex robots has been an arduous task, our CAD engineers tackled it head on. They have spent many hours discussing and debating the nuances of the build, and the rest of the team is sure that their design will prove robust in the competition field. Evaluating both designs will help us select the one best suited to our strategy and the most important scoring opportunities in this year's game.
In December, both teams will also participate in our first scrimmages at Langley Park School for Boys. These friendly matches will provide our first opportunity of the season to benchmark our robots against other teams.
We will soon host weekly online and in-person meetings with other teams and mentors to learn from the wider robotics community. Additionally, we are planning a series of fundraising events, with a target of raising approximately £3,000 across both robotics' teams, to support our ongoing development, competition preparation, and wider team activities. We are very grateful to our current sponsors: Accu, Blue Education, and CECES.
This season, we have also established four further clubs: Junior Robotics, Senior Coding Club, Robotics Industry, and Computing Society, which mean that keen students throughout each section of the school community can take part in robotics.
Please do follow our progress online here:
Written by Razi, Adam, Anshul, Savith and Dhir (Year 12)
