Sweating over robots ahead of Olympiad

Students preparing for a regional Olympiad round are priming robots in waste collection.

For the past two months, their weekends have been anything but leisurely. Every Saturday and Sunday, a group of 12 students reach the Kerala State Science and Technology Museum (KSSTM) at PMG here with an eye on bagging the top spot in the regional championship of this year’s World Robot Olympiad.

The students, from government and aided schools, tinker with Lego EV3 kits trying to get their robots to work in line with the theme of the contest ‘Rap the scrap.’ Shortlisted after two rounds of tests, they are being sponsored by the KSSTM for the contest.

The children have been divided into groups, with each set to participate in a different category. While the youngest lot try to programme their robots to clean up the road on the children’s journey to school, another group’s task is to get the robot to collect and transport recyclable waste from home to recycling bins. The oldest of the students have to make their robots bring sorted waste in the bins to a recycling plant.

September-end

The regional round will be held at the KSSTM at the end of September. Akhila G.P., Rafsal R.S., and Anand M., none of whom has played with Lego bricks before, let alone the high-end versions they are working on now, are stumped by their robot’s failure to pick up waste. They had built this robot anew in the morning after dismantling an underperforming version. The trio is confident that they will get it to lift the ‘scrap’ soon enough. This is critical, for at the contest they will have to build the robot from scratch in the allotted time.

So, for now, it is looking up YouTube videos and poring over a Lego Mindstorms book figuring out ways to overcome the hurdle.

They also have help from Akhila Gomez, a mentor at the KSSTM’s Innovation Hub, and Cyril K. Babu, Scientific Officer.

Building robots is only part of the challenge. They also have to write programmes and none of them has done programming before. “Only a part of the programme remains to be completed,” say the children.

“Without any prior exposure to robotics, it is amazing how far the children have come in such a short time,” says Akhila Gomez.