page_title: Student Robotics
section_title: 2020: "Two Colours"
hierarchical_section_title: Student Robotics / Competitions / 2020: "Two Colours"
caption_attribution_description: English: The virtual arena from the Student Robotics 2020 Livestream
context_page_description: Student Robotics is a registered charity that runs an annual robotics competition for teams of 16 to 19 year-olds. The charity aims to foster a world where engineering and artificial intelligence is accessible to young people with a stated mission "to bring the excitement of engineering and the challenge of coding to young people through robotics". The competition is free to enter and teams are provided with all of the core electronics that they need to build a robot. To encourage creative and ingenious solutions to problems, constraints on design are kept to a minimum, and the students can build and fashion their robots with any materials they choose; this results in a wide range of quirky, original robots. The robots must operate autonomously; once they are switched on to compete no interference from the team is allowed.
  The organisation was founded at the University of Southampton in 2006 by Robert Gilton and Stephen English. Students at the University of Bristol and Grenoble INP joined the project in 2010. In 2016 the organisation became a registered charity.
context_section_description: This task involved gathering cardboard boxes (tokens) of exactly one colour. Both Gold and Silver tokens were placed in the arena. A central raised platform was placed at the centre of the arena to act as an obstacle. 
  The competition was due to be held at Reading University Students Union on 18th and 19th April, but was delayed, and then eventually cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
  A virtual competition was held instead of the physical competition across three weekends in July 2020. A simulated environment based on Webots was developed and distributed to teams. Teams were instructed to submit code at the start of each competition day, so that matches could be pre-recorded, and then live-streamed over YouTube.
  This final resulted in a 4 way tie so a tiebreaker match was held, the first since 2013.
  The Robot and Team Image award was not issued this year. This year also marked the first year to use Python 3 for student code, albeit only for the competition simulator.
caption: The virtual arena from the Student Robotics 2020 Live-stream
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