Princeton High Students Represent U.S. At RoboCup Junior 2021

PRINCETON, NJ — Four students from Princeton High School are representing the United States at the international RoboCup Junior 2021 Online tournament. The event features groups from across the globe, who bring their robots to compete in a soccer tournament.

Mark Ogata, Niklas Austermann, Danil Korennykh, and Alexander Schwartz are Princeton High School students and members of the Princeton Soccer Robots Club. They won the RoboCupJunior USA 2021 online final round held on May 30, ahead of the main tournament. In the competition, they are joined by Keiji Imai, a junior from Newton High School, MA.

The group had participated in the same tournament in 2019, which was held in Sydney. Last year, the tournament was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic, and this year it’s being held virtually.

The students are currently in Boston from where they are participating in the online tournament, which is scheduled to run through June 28.

The teens designed, implemented, and programmed the soccer robots. "Typically, you have one robot that's assigned to defense, it'll guard the goal and make sure that the other team can’t score. The other robot attempt to shoot the ball into the opposing team’s goal from a relatively large distance,” explained Austermann.

The robots have a microcontroller on the underside of the PCB, and sensors attached to the bottom. The students then program the bots using input from the sensors.

“Using those it can determine, in nearly any case, what it needs to do, where it needs to go, or what is needed. So, it doesn't actually need any human input,” Austermann explained.

The soccer robots also have an attached camera that allows them to see in all directions. “The robot can use the camera to see the goal and goalie. So instead of kicking the ball straight towards the opposing team’s robot, it can move in different directions to score. This proved to be super valuable. It's much harder to get that information without a camera,” said Imai.

The team is given a challenge every day and they have 24 hours to come up with a solution. They then record their video and upload it for the judges to review.

“We had four technical challenges and one super team challenge. So that's five hackathons in a row. So yeah, that's a lot of work, but fun work ahead of us,” said Ogata.

On some days the group spends hours solving the problems posed to them by the panel of judges. On other days, they are done in an hour. “It all depends on challenges, so we can't really prepare for it. It just depends on how well our robots end up working. The hope is that we can get them to work in time,” said Imai.

The group is competing against 40 teams from across the globe, including Japan, Germany, Brazil, China, India, and Russia.

But the teens, who are self-taught in building robots, are confident of topping the table. “We're gonna strive to get number one, but we're relatively confident that we can be in the top 10,” said Austermann.

During the lockdown last year, the students went from weekly meetings at school to meeting virtually. They collaborated online to work on the 3-D design of their robots. Earlier this year, they would meet outdoors at Grovers Park to work on their robots.

When the teens started their team, Imai was living in Princeton. “And after that, I moved to Massachusetts. But at that point, we were already a pretty strong team. So, it was easier to just work together,” Imai said. “Sometimes Mark and Nicholas will come up to visit, so we would build the robot together.”

Although the students have built a robot to play soccer, they aren’t big fans of the game.

“I used to play soccer in 4th grade, not anymore,” said Ogata. “The final mission of the Robocop as an organization is to beat humans at normal soccer. But we're a little bit far from that right now.”

The students formed the Princeton Soccer Robots back in 2019 after they were beaten at the World Cup. They hope to recruit new members to the club so it can continue even after they graduate high school.

“The goal of the club is not just to make good robots, but to teach others the skills that lie behind it, which are of course, applicable in many different areas,” said Austermann.

“Whatever engineering career you choose, it can be useful to have learned the skills that go into a soccer robot. And thus, we think it's important that we can teach these skills to other students.”

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