Every year, BSM’s robotics team competes in the international Robocup rescue competition, where students prepare a robot for several different disaster simulations. However, this year’s Robocup competition is the first in nearly three years, and the new dates have left the robotics team scrambling to meet the updated deadlines.

The submission deadline for the competition this year has been moved up, and the BSM robotics team has had to constantly adjust. “We basically need a functional robot, by, I believe it’s late February, early March. Which is a deadline that we didn’t realize we were going to have to have and so we’re kind of scrambling right now and in crunch time to get something working,” Danny Bruer, who has been involved in Robocup for four years, said.

COVID 19 is a significant concern and the main reason that the date of submission was adjusted. “They want to be able to vet everybody for COVID sake, because [in] Thailand we’re all going to be in a convention center, so there’s going to be a lot of people there and a lot of people are going to be traveling. They don’t want to take any unnecessary risks. So if a team doesn’t look like they’re up to snuff and can’t get a robot together in that amount of time, they can’t go to Robocop, and they can eliminate someone who might have come and just not done very well… Because that way, they could have been a vector for COVID. So it just is a way of reducing the numbers,” Bruer said.

However, the team does have one advantage – the date of Robocup has been moved back a week. This will allow more time to continue to work on and tweak the robot, so it is fully-functional before leaving for Bangkok, Thailand in mid-July. “Well, it gives us a little bit more time to prepare which is great. So that really helps us in making sure we get everything ready,” Charles Nepomuceno, faculty advisor of the Robocup team said.

The new date isn’t all good, as students have to adjust their schedules to make the competition or have to miss the trip all together. “Some of them who probably could have gone originally might not be able to go anymore because there are usually things in the middle of July,” Nepomuceno said.

Despite these challenges, Robocup members are looking forward to the competition and showcasing their creation. “I’m over the moon with excitement for RoboCup… I’ve been excited since my sophomore year of high school to go to Robocop and just compete and see all the cool robots,” Bruer said.