RoboCon is a competition, run by Hills Road students, for local secondary schools. Each school gets 6 months to build an autonomous robot using a loaned kit (developed by Hills Road students), to go head-to-head during a competitive game to score the most points. For more info, visit the RoboCon website!

I was selected as staff to become leader of the HRSFC Robotics Society in Janurary 2024, I remained as leader until I left in summer 2025.

My responsibilities

As leader I was responsible for:

• Ensuring the competition ran smoothly, running competition and kick-off event days.
• Liaising with staff and students at secondary schools, offering support over video calls, in-person events and emails.
• Delegating tasks between my team, and planning out tasks to ensure we were prepared for the competition.
• Building and debugging the robot kit we built and lent out to schools.
• Engineering a suitable, fun challenge for the schools to compete in and built robots for.

Skills Gained

• Teamwork: delegating tasks and ensuring the whole team was happy and worked together running the events.

• Problem solving: fixing bugs with the kit, helping students on competition days fix their robots, and solving technical faults at the competition events.

• Public speaking: commentating during the competition rounds, hosting events, doing prize presentations and kick-off presentations.

• Large Codebase debugging: Our codebase for the Raspberry Pi brains we lend out to schools is massive, I developed skills in finding bugs, fixing them, and maintaining a large codebase for future developers.

• Writing clear docs: Clearly documented code is important for the upcoming students, and for those competing at RoboCon, I re-documented large parts of the codebase when building the RoboCon docs website.

• Networking & Websockets: I built live sockets to feed logs and camera feeds from the arena robots, to the live screens at the competition. I also maintained a system to feed the music and commentary between two rooms at the competition.

Favourite projects I worked on

• Live camera & log feeds: I rebuilt the system feeding camera and logs to the screens at the competition. It was originally a HTTP polling system, which was slow and inefficient. I built a live WebSocket to dynamically send logs and images to the screens the moment they were updated. This was more efficient and reliable during the competition.
• New websites: I was heavily involved with building both the RoboCon main and RoboCon docs websites. I learnt how to built websites with NodeJS, and successfully built two easily maintainable websites that were clear and easy to navigate.
• Live synced audio: At the competition, we are split between the competition arena and the robot-building room. I setup a system to stream the audio feed from the arena into the robot-building room in as low-latency as possible. This gave me a deeper knowledge of networks and the issues faced with them!
• Working with schools: I thoroughly enjoyed working with schools to allow them to build robots. I taught 11-15 year olds Python, and helped them debug their code, passing on knowledge I had learnt. This was extremely rewarding throughout my two years at RoboCon.

I still volunteer at this competition every year to help the current students, and I really enjoy seeing how teams have conquered the competition differently every year!

Public Articles

The below have been published about the competitions I was involved with running.

• Hills Road Sixth Form Article for 2025: “RoboCon 2025 is a ‘flaming’ success”
• RoboCon Official Articles: “RoboCon 2024 in review” and “RoboCon 2025 in review”

About the Robotics Society

Hills Road robotics is a society, run by students at Hills Road. The society builds robots to compete at Student Robotics (a robot competition run by Southampton university), and runs a similar robot competition for local secondary school students “RoboCon”.