The University Of Auckland Robotics

We are a group of students from the University of Auckland, aiming to compete at the highest level in a number of robotics related areas, while supporting robotics in our community.



Robotics

Research projects tailored towards a long-term goal to create robot assistants to interact with, and assist humans in our daily lives.

Our research

Our interdisciplinary group has developed since 2010 based on our work in developing hardware and software prototypes. Over the years, some prototypes we have built include task planners, subtask learners, an instruction understander, navigation, speech recognition, mobile robot, robot arm with gripper and wrist, a mobile robot operating system, robot navigation, vision based robot localisation, vacuuming robot application, soccer robots, teleoperated robots across the network, a robot guide, a virtual robot world for experimentation, and a number of other robotics techniques and applications.

Find out more about our team and current work on the University of Auckland Robotics website.Centre for Automation and Robotic Engineering Science



Our people

  • Professor Bruce MacDonald (Group leader)
  • Dr Karl Stol
  • Associate Professor Catherine Watson

More research in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

What do we do?

Competitions and Projects

Our main focus at AURA is competiting and with projects running alongside them, there’s no shortage of things for members to do!

We compete in the VEX Robotics Competition, Droid Racing Challenge, Robot Soccer and Combat Robotics.

Projects are often on a smaller scale but we have also done larger scale projects, with a highlight being our custom Puma Beatbot replica.

Volunteering

Volunteering is a key part of what we do at AURA.

We primarily provide support to the VEX Robotics High School scene in Auckland but other programs include Robot Olympiad, FLL and we have also visited schools and organisations in the past to teach kids about robotics.

Event Organising

AURA runs the Mini Robot Rumble competition with the generous support of our primary sponsor Vodafone.

Mini Robot Rumble is a Combat Robotics competition for students in New Zealand.



AURA sells kits to teams and provides support, with it all culminating in the competition day, where teams get to test out their bots.