Summary

BananaBots members won USA Championships in 2019 RoboCup Junior Rescue Line Open and Primary competitions.

Full text

On May 19th, 2019, RoboCup Junior (RCJ) USA competitions took place at Trinity School in New York City. Three teams from our BananaBots Robotics Club participated in this event, and they took home two national championships.

• Team N.E.R.D., with 8th grade members Peter Lin and Andy Cheng, won the first place in Rescue Line Open League.
• Team RoboRaiders, comprised of 7th graders Rohan Dugad and Ryan Wen, ranked first in the Rescue Line Primary League.
• Additionally, 8th graders Rohan Dham, Alex Hu and Jerry Liu from Team BananaBots had shown remarkable resilience after technical setbacks.

The official records can be found on RCJ USA Website.

This was the first time that the club members participated in RCJ, all three rookie teams learned both various hardware and software skills during a very short period of time and demonstrated strong work ethic.

RoboCup Junior is pre-college level division of world renowned AI-oriented RoboCup Federation. RCJ organizes annual competitions where middle and high school students showcase their robotics skills in various leagues, such as Rescue and Soccer. The Rescue Line Leagues require that an autonomous robot follows a black line while overcoming different challenges in a modular arena with different patterns.

Team N.E.R.D., which represents Storming Robots, a well known robotics engineering and computer science learning institute based in Branchburg, qualified to attend RCJ World Championship event. Early July, they will travel to Sydney, Australia, where teams from more than 30 countries will compete.

BananaBots is a Somerset 4-H robotics club where its members learn and practice robotics and computer programming skills under the guidance of club's teen coach, Ethan Wu, a junior in Bridgewater-Raritan High School and a veteran of RCJ with multiple national and international awards. All but one BananaBots club members are students from Bridgewater-Raritan Middle School.