RoboCode battles come to Tipp

The National RoboCode Final to be held in the Thurles campus of Tipperary Institute on March 11.

During the past three months, college and university students have made "battle bots" with on-board intelligence to manoeuvre and fire on screen.

The best Robot Tanks from 10 colleges and universities will battle to the finish in Thurles in an event sponsored by the Irish Computer Society.

Sun Microsystems has supported the competition with its Java computer language in the electronic robots as well as with monetary support from BCS Computers.

The national competition also enjoys sponsorship from the Higher Education Authority, LAN Communications, and Fieldmaster.

Unlike the real-life destruction machines that feature on Robot Wars, RoboCode is a game where teams use Java to program one or more robot tanks to battle in an arena against each other.

The little graphical tanks need to be programmed to avoid being hit. They need to be smart enough to move around an arena without any kind of manual control.

The arena is a large computer monitor that is projected onto a wall.

Each RoboCode match normally lasts less than three minutes, until one robot tank is destroyed.

Similar to a real land battle, all the work for RoboCode happens well before the robots are launched into battle.

The RoboCode competition appeals to first year programming students. "It is intended as an opportunity for fresher years to demonstrate their programming abilities," said Phil Bourke, the Irish organiser.