Each year students from Dallas- and Fort Worth-area high schools face off at The University of Texas at Arlington to see whose Lego Mindstorms robot can navigate through a maze without direct control and/or find an object using vision and touch. The competition, called RoPro, is the sixth annual high school robot programming contest sponsored by the Computer Science and Engineering Department at UT Arlington.

Using identical robotic kits, students demonstrate their programming skills to get the robots to achieve maximum performance in three assigned tasks: navigate a beginning maze, navigate an advanced maze with virtual walls and find a specified object on the playing field. Teams can also score points for engineering and artistic design.

The 10th Annual High School Robot Programming Contest at UTA has double the fun

On Saturday, Feb 6th the atrium of Nedderman Hall at the University of Texas at Arlington was full of Lego robots and their high school student builders and programmers from around the Metroplex. The robots were programmed and built by high school students to compete in the High School Robot Programming Contest, RoPro, sponsored by the Computer Science and Engineering Department at UTA (CSE@UTA). Teams from around the Dallas-Fort Worth area competed in six different competitions as part of this annual outreach and recruiting event. New teams competed in the speed-based beginning maze competition where the robot does not know the course beforehand. More experienced teams competed in the advanced maze competition where "virtual" walls, made of colored tape on the floor, had to be treated just like the wooden walls and in the object finding competition where robots must locate, identify and the move colored golf balls within the maze. The robots that competed had been programmed to solve these tasks in the competition. Students designed and implemented the software the make the robots perform. Once a robot started the competition, it was entirely on its own following only the instructions of its software and its sensors. This year’s contest had twice as many competitions as in the past since this was the first year that both old style yellow-brick RCX Lego Mindstorms robots and new-style white and gray NXT Lego Mindstorms robots were included.

The participating teams came from high schools in three school districts with Arlington, Sam Houston, and James Bowie from Arlington ISD, the Science and Engineering Magnet and the Talented and Gifted Magnet from Dallas ISD, Granbury High School from Granbury ISD, and a Texas charter school. Some of these schools have participated since our first competition and they use the RoPro contest as a way to motivate their students to practice concepts learned in class and then apply them for the competitions. These excellent teachers are preparing students to become the engineers of the future at UT Arlington and elsewhere.

The RoPro High School Robot Programming contest is sponsored by the Computer Science and Engineering Department of UT Arlington as a way to recruit high school students to UTA and to introduce the fun of programming. Former RoPro participants are now current students at UTA and some of them come volunteer to help run the contest each year.

Next year's RoPro competition will be held Saturday, February 4th, 2012. If you know of a high school that might be interested in participating in this free competition, have them contact Dr. Carter Tiernan, Assistant Dean for the College of Engineering at tiernan@uta.edu to get involved. More information about this event is available at www.cse.uta.edu/Robots/.

The list of winning teams is given below. Congratulations to all the teams that participated in RoPro 2010!