More about the competition, and a photo of the team.

RoboCupJunior is an education-focused robotics competition for primary and secondary school students. Teams design, construct, and program autonomous robots to complete a variety of challenges; including soccer, rescue, and dance.

The Storming Robots team will be competing in the Rescue challenge, in which each robot must navigate through a recreated disaster scenario to identify victims quickly and accurately. The robots are equipped with a number of sensors to allow them to interact with their environment, include ultra-sonic sensors to identify obstacles and walls and multiple light sensors for identifying paths or victims. For the international event, the students will be adding an accelerometer to determine incline and an on-board vision subsystem.

In addition to the engineering challenge of constructing the robot, the students face the complex task of programming their robot to interact autonomously with the disaster environment, requiring an understanding of the fundamentals of computer science. This includes complex multitasking and sensor feedback controls. (from the press release about RoboCup 2009,
Elizabeth Mabrey, 2009).