A pair of robotics teams from the same South Surrey high school will compete against one another – and several other teams – in coming weeks, until a winner is selected to represent Canada at an international contest this summer.
Each team competing at the event, which is being held in Alberta this year, has to complete two missions; one is mandatory while the second allows students to put their creativity and technological skills to the test and come up with unique assignments.
“Semiahmoo has always had a robotics team but it kind of stopped because of COVID,” explained Daniel Xu, a Grade 11 student from Semiahmoo Secondary on the Astraios team.
“So this is the first year back and all of the people in robotics club now, they weren’t a part of it before.”
Although Astraios will be in competition with Team Tech Elites, — the other Semiahmoo Secondary team — all the students from the club are embracing teamwork and have the same goal: to represent Canada in the European CanSat Competition in June.
Each satellite, which is the size of a pop can, has to detect carbon emission levels as it descends by a parachute.
“Our secondary mission is to detect habitability on Earth. We’re going to do that using dirt samples and we also… have a rover in ours, which is an extra part,” said Raelyn Xu (no relation to Daniel), a Grade 11 student on Team Tech Elites.
Meanwhile, Astraios took inspiration from SpaceX to conduct a controlled landing for their satellite.
“Our secondary mission is to ensure the re-usability of our CanSat. To achieve this, we are implementing a controlled descent system using a drone-like propeller system. This will be facilitated by a flight controller and electronic speed controller,” said Roshan Ramchandani, a Grade 11 student on the team.
The two teams of six members each — leaving on Thursday, April 20 for Alberta — also had to make a radio to transmit data, with the students now working hard to improve their radios’ ranges to 20 kilometres.
“It’s not incredibly difficult to learn, so this is a good competition for people that are beginners (in) robotics,” Daniel said.
The two teams are competing in the ‘Advanced’ category this year, but younger students also have the opportunity to run in the ‘Beginner’ category next year.
Enrolling in a robotics class is not mandatory for those on the team, said Shener Hasan (Tech Elites), adding that most never took the class but are now enjoying being in the club.
“I didn’t take robotics before this, so another team member, he helped me with this and it was a pretty fun learning process” said Bowen Zhan, from Astraios.
The teams are confident that next year, Semiahmoo’s robotics club will have three-to-four teams entering competitions.
“I think it’s cool that local teams are aiming and aspiring to achieve success on a larger scale,” Raelyn said.
@SobiaMoman
sobia.moman@peacearchnews.com
Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.