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.

8th Annual High School Robot Programming Contest Lets Students Show Off Their Skills At UTA

Little yellow robots buzzed around the Nedderman Hall atrium at the University of Texas at Arlington on Saturday, February 7th, 2009. 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). Twenty-two teams from nine area high schools competed in 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 twenty-two participating teams came from high schools including Arlington, Sam Houston, and James Bowie from Arlington ISD, the Science and Engineering Magnet and the Talented and Gifted Magnet from Dallas ISD, DeSoto High School from DeSoto ISD, Granbury High School from Granbury ISD, a Texas charter school, and area home schools. Every Lego robot was programmed by the students to work autonomously in its event. Once started, the robot was under its own control following the instructions programmed into it. No remote controls here!

RoPro has become a tradition for many of the teachers who coach these teams. The RoPro competition gives these great teachers an opportunity to practice concepts learned in class and then apply them in the competition. The results are both fun and instructive. The 2008 RoPro competition will also be able to help some of these students in the future. As the result of a grant, any student team member who competed this year and is accepted to UTA in the CSE department will receive a $1000 scholarship. If their team won an award this year then they will receive a $2000 scholarship to CSE@UTA. Some former RoPro participants are currently CSE students and we look forward to having even more.

For the 2008 CSE @ UTA RoPro Competition, the winning teams were: