Next kickoff: January 25th January
What is HARPA?
A free-form robotics club for all amateur and aspiring robotics hobbyists. Rescue robotics is the goal, with a semesterly final challenge where robots compete on rescuing little 3D printed ‘people’ from a 5x5x5m modular arena. The formfactor, technologies and approach to building robots is completely up to each team!
The challenge is meant to offer a guiding goal to build towards, but it is merely a helping hand in the process of building freeform hobby robots. Many participants build cool conceptual robots for the heck of it without specifically tackling the challenge. The goal is building cool robots!
How is HARPA organised?
Every Thursday evening after 17:00, the HARPA-ers gather at their leisure at the Hanze Makerspace to work on their robotics projects. The Makerspace sponsors all teams with components, tools, space and guidance. Need components, prints, lasercuts, crafting materials, or else? Let de Makerspace know and we’ll go fetch it (within reason).
The evenings are open, there are regular workshops for newer members and coaching available to those in need. It’s organized by a bunch of robo-curious teachers, for anyone who wants to share that hobby!
Why does HARPA exist?
Robotics is an inspiring, practical and generally awesome way to get more hands-on with technology. It’s a domain that combines electronics, mechanics, programming and many other disciplines together into exciting physical end products. A perfect opportunity to learn through experimentation we thought.
While many robotics clubs may choose a formal international competition as their end goal, we wanted to keep it a little more open; keeping the challenge in-house allows robots to be more freeform, more creative and more experimental!
Can I join HARPA?
Yes! Any student or staff member of the Hanze or RUG can join in on the fun. Technical background or not, we provide the same opportunity to all students to start experimenting with robotics. Engineering-focused students are very welcome to come put their technical skills to the test, as much as any social-, sports-, legal-, business- or otherwise oriented students are welcome to take their first steps into the field.
Just sign up below and we’ll put you on the list!
You’ll be invited to the weekly build nights, the club Whatsapp group and receive regular HARPA updates and support from the Makerspace team!
Meet the Bots
Since May 2023, the HARPA roboticists have been hard at work creating a team of clever, cute and crazy robots. Wheeled, legged and propellored frames fly, drive and walk across the makerspace every thursday evening getting ever better and better at their tasks. Take a look!
Hexawheel
Bicopter
Foambot
Omnibot
Hexawheel
Triblade Copter WIP
Semesterly Arena Challenge
While the building challenge of HARPA is pretty freeform, we do like working towards a common goal, which is set to be a for-fun rescue style challenge. Officially, all teams work on robots that can traverse this 5m x 5m x 5m arena in any imaginable way and thereby rescuing as many little characters as possible from a wide array of challenging nooks, surfaces, towers and other tricky places.
Scoring system is TBA but it will reward creativity, performance and the achieving of particularly tricky rescues.
Every team designs and builds a platform from scratch using off-the-shelf components (or not, up to you!) to tackle this arena-style rescue challenge. But again: this is pretty loosely enforced 🙂
We will run this challenge once per semester! Every semester each team is invited to rebuild their robot design, improve a previous robot or try something entirely new! It’s the moment twice a year where we get all participants of HARPA together to celebrate our shared hobby and see the results of all the cool robot-building projects.
Sign up!
Signing up is completely up to you and non-binding – we just like to know who wants to be and stay a part of the robotics club. If you later decide that it’s not your thing or that you don’t have time to actively participate anymore, please let us know! You can rejoin any time in the future again. It’s just good to know who we should keep in the loop.
