"Did you guys get this? :P" my friend QC asked.  It was an email looking for people to build a robot for the New Inventors, a television show on ABC.  It sounded fun, so I emailed ABC back and booked Robogals on as one of the 4 contestants for their New Inventors special sumo robot competition.

Amidst assignments and exams, I assembled a small team together (that incidentally included QC!) and we designed and purchased all the equipment we needed over a couple of weeks.  We started our robot by building the chassis out of steel, complete with a scoop at the front so that our robot would be able to scoop up any other robot that came her way; after another two weeks of electronics and mechanical fiddling, our sumo robot was built! We named our robot Val, after a dear friend of mine, and because it rhymes with the famous robot Hal.

The day before we left for Sydney to compete, we realized that the wheels we’d created out of polyurethane were too soft and wouldn’t be able to support the robot properly!  So, we stayed up until 4am that night creating new wheels before leaving for the airport at 6am!  (We were so tired!)

Before (too) long, it was time to film the sumo robot competition!  The robot competition had to be filmed before the rest of the show as the commentator was only available during the day, whereas the rest of the show was to be filmed at night.  As I was to be a panelist on the show, ABC didn’t want me to see the competition live, because they wanted to film my reaction.  So, I waited nervously in my dressing room while my team competed.

That night, I was a panelist on the New Inventors. I was so nervous! Thankfully, we’d prepared everything we were going to say beforehand, so I managed to get my lines out okay.

The whole experience was a lot of fun; and I am so grateful for having had the opportunity to make a robot with my friends, and speak on television!  

To find out how Val did in the sumo robot competition and how I did as a panelist, tune in to the New Inventors on ABC1 at 8:00pm, Wednesday 16 February 2011.

Val could not have been built without the invaluable skills of Luke Weston and Rob Brittain.  Special mentions also go to QC Nguyen, Byron Kingma, the Melbourne University Sumo Robot Team and Mark Parncutt; and the kind patience of Ming Poon, Jess Carruthers, Lisa Phu, Jake Llyod-Jones and Ingrid Arnott.