Trinity Infinity codes NASA robots to become world robotics competition finalists

The year-long coding and robotics competition is jointly run by NASA, MIT and the University of Sydney, and involves teams of secondary school students programming NASA research robots to complete challenges. Zero Robotics is split into domestic and international phases, with only a small number of teams selected to compete globally.  

Trinity’s team, called Trinity Infinity, met on a weekly basis to create and submit code in the lead up to the national competition. This code was then run against that of 48 competing teams from across Australia, after which Trinity Infinity was named the winner.

Our team was then invited to compete against 206 teams from around the world to write code that hooked two satellites together in microgravity. During this phase of the competition, Trinity Infinity teamed up with two other teams – one from Greece and one from Germany – to form an alliance called Apollo 1.

Apollo 1 was one of only 14 alliances to successfully make the final, which involved having their code run on the International Space Station by cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko and astronaut Anne McClain.

While the team didn’t take out first place, they did an exceptional job and showed that their coding skills are up there with the best in the world.

Congratulations to the following 2018 February intake Mathematics 2 students who took part in the competition:

Sahasvichni Chou, Richard Phoon, Qi Zhang, Irsa Sulistyo, Renwei Hu, Thai Duong Pham, Jiayi Xu, Daniel Owen Gunawan, Edward Huang, Junzhe Liao, Victoria Dai, Madison Shen, Michelle Vendita, Ziheng Wang, Yanting Mu, Heng Irseng, Fanshuo Guo, Akash Anil Nair, Tingwen Zheng.

Image: Trinity Infinity with their domestic trophy at the launch of the international competition at the University of Sydney. L–R: Yanting Mu (Chief Coder), Jess Mullin (Mathematics 2 lecturer), Thai Duong Pham (Joint Team Leader), Daniel Owen Gunawan (Mathematics).