Is invention your thing?
You’re not alone. With a career in IT you could be building robots for the first robotic sporting teams!
Is invention your thing?
You’re not alone. With a career in IT you could be building robots for the first robotic sporting teams! Now robots might seem like something far off in the future but did you know that by 2050 it is predicted there will be official robot sports teams?Final year university students Jake Magro and Matthew Rys are already on their way to careers in robotics after receiving CSIRO’s vacation scholarships. This let them spend 11 paid weeks working with Brisbane CSIRO tech experts on some pretty cool research and robotic projects.
Jake spent his holidays designing a ROS Android Watcher that could be used with some of the CSIRO’s current robots. Don’t know what ROS is? It is the language that tells robots how and where to move.
“At the start I designed a program that had big buttons on an android phone that I moved the robots with, kind of like a game,” Jake said. “By the end though I just had to flick my phone whichever way I wanted to move the robot. It was pretty fun playing around with it and a step up from the first robot I worked with.”
“I do IT at uni and first worked with robots in an elective subject where we had to make them dodge walls and some other obstacles. I really enjoyed it but we didn’t get too much time to play around with them so I ended up doing robotics for my final project. I designed a soccer playing robot that used colour to register the field, ball and goal posts”. “Robotics is something I am going to stay in for sure,” he said.
Matthew spent his 11 weeks working in the CSIRO’s aerospace division designing a motor that had a spinning 2D laser that displayed 3D maps. His project, when fine-tuned, can be put on helicopters and planes to help them see and avoid obstacles. It can also help increase the flight time and save fuel, a major plus in aerospace.
One of the other cool student projects was ROS enabled hexapods. These guys are little robots that look a bit like spiders with tiny cameras attached. They can move in any direction and get into spaces that are either too small or too dangerous for people to go. Very handy!
Interested in robotics? Find out more about doing work experience with CSIRO if you are in year 10 or higher.
