The Winners of this years "RoboRugby" competition have been announced

_{Winning Team 18 with Mr. Cian Dowd, a Senior Digital Verification Engineer at Infineon Technologies, Erin, Sean & Lucca and Dr. Paul Cuffe, Assistant Professor, UCD School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering}

Each year, the first year module EEEN10020 'Robotics Design Project' culminates in a fun "RoboRugby" competition, where autonomous Arduino robots face off in an elimination tournament of head-to-head action. The 2024 edition was held on Wednesday 17th April in the UCD Engineering & Materials Science Centre. Over the Spring trimester, 54 students, mostly from first year engineering, formed 19 teams who progressively built and programmed an autonomous robot out of a standard kit of Lego parts & electronic components. They programmed these robots to independently traverse their way around a gameplay table, capturing coloured balls and trying to score as close to 8 points as they could in each sixty second match.

On the day the overall winners were Team 18 (Erin Besancon, Sean Bonar & Lucca Browning) whose clever robot employed a crafty defensive strategy that always managed to clear any balls out of their opponents' scoring zone.

The event was supported by Infineon Technologies Prize who provided €1000 of prizes, which was apportioned between the top four teams.

The module co-ordinator, Dr. Paul Cuffe (Assistant Professor, UCD School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering) comments:

"Great class this year! It was a busy trimester; all the teams were in the lab every Wednesday afternoon, building, testing, programming and getting hands-on experience with a creative engineering project. Believe me, it's harder than it looks to get those robots to behave themselves on that gameplay table but the 2024 cohort gave it a fair shake! Congrats to the outright winners, Team 18, and well done to the whole class for their hard work, good attitudes and fair play. Big thanks go to the Teaching Assistants who helped me deliver the module this year; to Dr. Anshu Mukherjee who contributed his TinkerCAD expertise; and to Paulo Vieira for all the technical support. Major appreciation too to Infineon Technologies for coming out, meeting the students, enjoying the spectacle and providing a bit of a prize fund to make things exciting!"

_{Second Place Team 8 with Mr. Cian Dowd, a Senior Digital Verification Engineer at Infineon Technologies, Luke, Ebube & Aoife and Dr. Paul Cuffe, Assistant Professor, UCD School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering}

_{Third Place Team 1 with Mr. Cian Dowd, a Senior Digital Verification Engineer at Infineon Technologies, Julieta, Estela & Matteo and Dr. Paul Cuffe, Assistant Professor, UCD School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering}

_{Fourth Place Team 2 with Mr. Cian Dowd, a Senior Digital Verification Engineer at Infineon Technologies, Rohan, Liam & Finn and Dr. Paul Cuffe, Assistant Professor, UCD School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering}