Centennial High School Zero Robotics Students In First Place With International Team Awaiting Final Round On the International Space Station

Pictured Top L-R: Brandon Hang, Trevor Garner, Brian Bi, Garrett Rioux and Advisor Dianna Denton

A group of Centennial High school students formed an alliance with two Italian teams and are awaiting the final round of competition live on the International Space Station. The top Italian team and the group of Centennial students have been working together to create code to move their team to first place in the final online simulation phase. Finalists from the online simulation phase will proceed to the ISS, where an astronaut conducts a live competition with the SPHERES satellites and in microgravity! This final ISS event will be hosted simultaneously at MIT, an ESA site and the University of Sydney with special audio/video links. All finalist teams are invited to attend in person at either ESA, MIT or the University of Sydney.

The Centennial group team name of OverExtendedProgramming joined the ITI "Augusto Righi" students from Napoli, Italy known as ZRighi and the Liceo Scientifico Avogadro students from Vercelli, Italy known as LSA Robotics Team to form the top-ranked team of SpaceLinguine heading into the finals. What is Zero Robotics? Zero Robotics is a robotics programming competition where the robots are SPHERES (Synchronized Position Hold Engage and Reorient Experimental Satellites) inside the International Space Station. The competition starts online, on this website, where teams program the SPHERES to solve an annual challenge. After several phases of virtual competition in a simulation environment that mimics the real SPHERES, finalists are selected to compete in a live championship aboard the ISS. An astronaut will conduct the championship competition in microgravity with a live broadcast!  High School Tournament: Geared towards students in grades 9-12, the tournament takes place from September to December each year. This is an international event open to all teams from the US and member states of the European Space Agency. Tournament Objectives The participants compete to win a technically challenging game by programming their strategies into the SPHERES satellites. The game is motivated by a current problem of interest to DARPA, NASA and MIT. Student software controls satellite speed, rotation, direction of travel, etc. Depending on the game premise, the students must program their satellites to complete game objectives (navigate obstacles, pick up virtual objects, etc.) while conserving resources (fuel, charge, etc.) and staying within specified time and code-size limits. The programs are "autonomous" - that is, the students cannot control the satellites during the test itself. Tournament Timeline 2016-Sept-10 Kickoff webcast live from MIT

2016-Sept-30 2D Practice (simulation) Submission

UPDATE: OEP finished 20th out of 144 3D Competition Simulation Submission 2016-Oct-30 International teams

Picked by #1, ZRighi, as the first 2016-Nov-05 Alliance Draft selection in the draft

UPDATE: Finished as Top Team of the final 28 Alliance Competition Simulation Submission 2016-Dec-16 teams

UPDATE: ISS Code Submission 2017-Jan-06

2017-Jan TBD ISS Finals! Currently scheduled for Friday, 1/27