Over the weekend, 136 teams from across Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Brazil took to the BMO Centre to compete in one of Canada’s largest robotics competitions.

Though the conception of the sport likely instantly brings to mind the brutal combat of Battle Bots, Mecha Mayhem is more in line with a variety of different traditional sporting events.

This year’s challenge required teams to build robots that could compete in a challenge that was one part soccer and one part football. Teams had to use their robots to put triangular shaped objects called tri-balls into their opponent’s net, while also navigating barriers on the play field.

“These are teams from middle school and high school that have been working on the robots for a couple months now, and they’re bringing it all together to this tournament to compete,” said Jonathan Zhou, one of the event organizers for Mecha Mayhem.

“The whole point is to try and score more points than the other team, and what they’re going for here is a world qualification. So, if you win the tournament, or you win an award called the Excellence Award, then you qualify for the World Championship in Dallas.”

The competition was run by Western Mechatronics, a non-profit based out of Calgary, which seeks to connect youth with the world of robotics and STEM research.

Zhou said that the overall goal for the competition was to give students an opportunity to sharpen skills in engineering, math, science, and team building. The process of building the robots, he said, often involved learning skills that would sometimes be introduced at post-secondary institutions.

“You get to learn how to use 3d modeling tools like CAD SolidWorks… it’s stuff that I’m learning now in my second year of university. The fact that I was able to pick it up and like experience it in high school is super, super unique,” he said.

Team building and long-lasting connections

The other aspect, said Zhou, was the focus on team building—which extended beyond just one school or organization’s team. As part of the competition, teams qualifying for the finals were paired up with other teams to act as their partners on the game field.

“You don’t know your alliance partner until you’re at the match, so you’ve got to take a look at your robot and say ‘OK, my robot’s kind of better at scoring, yours might be little bit faster, so let’s devise a strategy on the spot,’” he said.

“It does teach you how to make split second decisions and also trusting your team. Because when you’re up there and you’re a driver, for example, you can only focus on one robot at a time. Your partners are telling you ‘OK, this is what you should do next.’ So you totally have to trust your team, and you’ve got to work together as a unit.”

He said that it also helps to build long-term connections between competitors, even internationally.

“It’s kind of nice here because we have English and French as our official languages, so people can speak a little bit of those languages, but when we’re competing at the World Championship, for example, you have teams from China, and you have to speak to them through a translator. So, all of a sudden, you’re dealing with different cultures,” Zhou said.

“It’s such a good event to get a good sense that robotics isn’t just here, it’s all around the world.”

Competition builds on a common robotics platform

All of the competitors use a standard set of parts from the REC Foundation’s VEX robot catalogue.

“What we do is we try to encourage kids to get into STEM through competitive robotics. So we have programs from elementary school all the way up through college, and this event right here is a great example getting kids from all over the not just the Canada area, but US and other countries as well,” said Ryan Osweiler, Director of Regional Operations and Event Engagement with REC Foundation.

He said that the foundation has worked to develop VEX as a platform for groups like Western Mechatronics to run top level competitions.

“What we’ve developed over the last probably five or six years is this concept called a signature event, and what signature event is a regional, even multinational event concept that gives kids a World Championship-type experience, who may or may not get to go to Worlds’ themselves,” he said.

The Mecha Mayhem arena experience, and team paddocks, were not dissimilar from other top level eSports competitions. Competitions were streamed on big screens, and online, and stadium style seating was set up to allow attendees to take in the action.

Osweiler said that this was all designed to inspire students, and to help them build confidence.

“Many of these top notch teams here were once those beginner teams themselves. They got to go to an event like this, they get inspired, and they go back they spend a sometimes ridiculous amount of time working on their robot.”

He said that for some teams, competition was a year round thing. The day after a competition teams were back in their labs tinkering on and perfecting their next robot.

One of those teams was 210Z from Calgary, which is one of the home teams of Western Mechatronics and the champion winners from the 2023 Mecha Mayhem.

“Honestly, having the same environment having the same place, it just brings back a lot of memories. It motivates us to be even better than last year, and so far it’s been going pretty good,” said Kevin Zhao.

Heading into the Sunday afternoon finals on Feb. 4, the team had been undefeated through their 19 matches.

“We like to prioritize, because from previous tournaments we’ve lost because we’ve gone for a more difficult design, but that ended up actually backfiring. So we decided to stick with a simple, consistent design that we will know will always work.”

Osweiler said that kind of learning was part of the reason why the competition was important.

“There’s a lot of different dynamics that go into what their ideas are when they decide to build a robot. There’s a lot of interaction and physical play with this game. So kids have to know that they’ve got to build strong, durable robots, but they also got to build fast robots. They’ve got to build a robot that can hang, that can push things around.”

For more information on Mecha Mayhem 2024, and Western Mechatronics, see www.westernmech.ca.