UBC Thunderbots
Bringing back the Thunder
June 21, 2009
Written by: William Gallego, Photos by; Ricky Gu
In 2006, Bahador Moosavi Zadeh revived Thunderbots, a UBC student team inactive since 2003, and encouraged a new generation of students to pursue learning beyond the classroom.
Thunderbots started off in 2001 by a group of electrical students. Enjoying success early on, the team grew to 20-25 members, but as key members graduated, interest waned, and by 2003, the grad students involved in the team were too busy to engage in any projects.
This continued until 2006, whereupon Bahador contacted some of the grad students to find out what was happening with Thunderbots and how he could start things up again.
“What they offered me was that if I could get a group of students together, and have a team running, they would give me all of the resources that they had, and we could start a fresh new team” says Bahador .
And so he did. Within a week, he had a team of five students, all friends dedicated to ensuring the success of the newly resurrected Thunderbots team. Within six months, after dealing with the administrational and transitional tasks, allocating funding and getting everything up and running, the Thunderbots team was ready to start on their new project; the Robocup international competitions.
“It was about March 2007, where we actually started working on the project, the small size Robocup competition” says Bahador. Two years in the making, Bahador continued working on this project even after he graduated, leading the ever evolving team to his original goal; a trip to Graz, Austria to compete in Robocup 2009, June 29th to July 5th.
And what’s after this competition? “There are several leagues in Robocup itself we can compete in, we are thinking of entering our team in other, leagues, while improving our team to succeed in the small size league”.
Bahador plans on staying on the team only until the completion of this year’s Robocup competition, having just graduated from the Engineering Physics, Mechatronics option and is hoping to continue his studies, starting September, in Masters of Applied Science. However, he has made sure that the Thunderbots team won’t falter once he leaves.
“From past experiences that we had, where a lot of people graduated from the team and it kind of fell apart, we decided to pass on the responsibilities to a younger generation. Last year, although I was still on the team, I passed on most of the responsibilities to two younger students, Amanda Li and Alim Jiwa, to lead the team.”
For more info on Thunderbots, check out their website at http://ece.ubc.ca/~robocup/.
