Tribotix - News & Interesting Robotic stuff ....

Tribotix have been an Industry Partner of TAFE's Digi-Girl program for over 3 years now and we will be again be assisting with the delivery of the highly successful robotics program from 29th July ~ 30th July at Meadowbank TAFE. This delivery is part of National ICT Careers Week activities in NSW.

Below is a promotional video showing a sample of what happens over the 2 days.



This program is great fun, and also gives the Year 9~12 girls and insite in career opportunites in Engineering and Computer Science.

The University of Newcastle's NUManoids have won the 2-legged league in the Standard Platform League at RoboCup in Suzhou, China. The NUManoid team replaced the NUBots (Sony Aibo based team) early this year, the NUBots have retired after winning RoboCup 2006 and having finished in the top 3 at RoboCup since entering (2002~2007).


After reaching the semi-finals Stephan Chalup, one of the Academic supervisors with the team, said "this is a very good result given this year’s short preparation time and selection of strong competitors". Stephan went on to say that "tomorrow the NUManoids will play in the final match of the league against a very strong American team which is a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon University and Georgia Tech".

The final was decided by Penalty shoot-out (the penalty shootout was judged based on the time to score a goal) where the NUManoids were victorious 1-0.

Full results of the competition can be viewed here.

The NUManoid team is lead by Naomi Henderson, this is the first year Naomi has had this responsibility. As well as being a 'robot soccer playing programming guru' Naomi describes herself as "a post graduate uni student who programs robots to play soccer by day and a 'cupcake ninja' by night".

Naomi's hidden talent was brought to our attention by a Blog on CNET.com. Have a look for yourself at Naomi's work, an example of which is shown below.


Everyone at Tribotix would like to pass on our congratulations to all associated with the NUManoids - they continually achieve excellent results through simple hard work, congratulations ....

Last Month I attended TechGirls, an event organised by Youth Connections, to promote Engineering and IT options for girls. At this event I was lucky enough to meet Pia Waugh, Pia's is a very active person in the Australian Linux & Open Source communities being:

• appointed Research Co-ordinator of the Australian Service for Knowledge of Open Source Software project (ASK-OSS),
• a former President & (2003~2004) and Vice President (2005-2007) of Linux Australia, and
  
• Project Leader for the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project in Australia.
  

Pia has put together a case study for HyKim on Australian Service for Knowledge of Open Source Software (ASK-OSS) web site. It's great that people in the open-source community are starting to take an interest in our work.