Students make mining robot
Grade 11 students create mining robot and take second place in National Robot Olympiad
A Crawford College team has come second in the National World Robot Olympiad at the Tshwane University of Technology.
Perpetual Motion, which comprised 11 graders Nikhil Daya, Tom He’ and Steven Walgenbach created a robot that could go into mines to extract minerals taking the place of humans to reduce the loss of life underground.
Walgenbach said the theme was prescribed by Olympiad judges.
“This year’s theme was robots exploring for minerals in potentially hazardous environments,” he said.
“Our robot was built, to scan for minerals, identify them and excavate them in potentially hazardous environments, reducing risk to human life” said Walgenbach.
The competition was held last month.
Walgenbach said robots were one of his biggest passions.
He said their team also qualified for the International Robot Olympiad in Qatar in November, but we will have to postpone because it clashed with exams.
Daya said though Walgenbach could not make the competition day, due to a match he had to play for South Africa, he played a major role in the building of the robot.
He’ said one of the problems they encountered testing the robot was because they had to keep it on for long period, they constantly had to change batteries.
“Every time we restarted, we had to reprogramme the robot from scratch because it lost memory while it was off,” he said.
“We used a motorbike-sized battery to run the 20cc robot.”
He said: “The design and construction of the robot was a collective effort. There were no allocated roles.”
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