Year 7 Students Amaze in Robotics Competition
Can robots make humans laugh?
Three Year 7 students recently participated in the final round of the FOBISIA Ohbot Robotics Competition, taking second place by a difference of only one point! Edward Tantapakul, Bryrn Boonvisut and Pana Joel Farnworth had one hour to plan, write, test and debug a program to solve the competition challenge using robot simulations. The program utilised speech recognition, dictation and related commands, which instructed the Ohbot to vocally reply to various prompts. The Ohbot is a programmable robot head with motors that make it turn and nod; eyelids that can snap open and shut; and lips that can be made to move as it speaks. The competition involved teams of students writing programmes to give Ohbot human-like behaviour; these are written using the Ohbot Windows App. The programmes were then tested live by the judges on a physical robot – you can watch the final programs being run by clicking here!
See below for an example of an Ohbot program code, similar to what these students were challenged to develop in the one-hour timeframe. Make sure to watch Bangkok Patana’s entry for some laughs!
