At least 22 students in the age group of 14-18 years from seven schools in the city are honing their teamwork skills, building and programming industrial-size robots to play a field game against 58 teams from across the world.
Team FRC 6024, as they are called, will participate in the FIRST Robotics Competition to be held in Sydney Olympic Park, Australia, in two regional competitions from March 11 to 13 and from March 16 to 18. They are part of the global community programme, For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology.
Right from designing the concept to raising funds, the students, with the help of three mentors, will execute all the organisational functions. Nilesh Shah, lead mentor, says constructing a robot is just part of the programme. “It is basically a holistic, hands-on programme.” The students are learning skills like mechanical robot construction, control system and electricals; programming; quality procedures; inventory management; inspection; safety procedures; event management; fund raising; game strategy and alliance strategy, he says.
The children had around eight months to prepare: pre-season from August 2017 till December 2017; build season from January 6, 2018, to February 20, 2018. This year’s theme is ‘power up’. In the first phase, they learnt Engineering and Physics principles, simple manufacturing techniques, electrical control systems, programming and coding, logic, and so on.
In the second phase, the students conceptualised, designed, manufactured, programmed and tested the robot in a self-designed play field arena.
In the competition, two alliances each comprising three teams (three robots) will compete in the format of a competitive sports arena. Says Ashwin Shah, electricals mentor, “According to this year’s theme, the two alliances are video game characters and their human operators who are trapped inside an arcade game. Both alliances have to defeat the boss in order to escape in this two-and-a-half minute game.”
Every team has to play 12 qualifying games of 2.5-minute duration each during which the alliances are randomly chosen. Based on the ranking positions, the qualified teams compete in the play-offs and then proceed to the quarter-finals, semi-finals and finals.
Says Aadiv Shah, construction mentor, “At the competition, all the team members will participate based on their core competence and roles assigned.”
For example, a group of five students will form the ‘drive team’ to run the robot in the arena; another group will carry out the maintenance of the robot between the rounds, and so on. Every team will be evaluated for robot game performance, safety culture, organisation, engineering and technical skills, entrepreneurial skills, presentation skills, quality aspects, community outreach and so on, according to Mr. Shah.
Team captain Adhyyan Sekhsaria, a Class XI student at Dhirubhai International School, says, “It is exciting as well as challenging to design a robot that is quick in picking up 1.6-kg cubes placed at different heights, and at the same time periodically clinging on to a bar placed 12 feet above the ground.”
Harsh Savla, a Class IX student of Edubridge School, says managing time has been the biggest challenge so far. “This event requires long hours of input. We rush to the workshop directly from school and work till late in the night.”
In the First Global Challenge held at Washington DC in July 2017, Team India won two medals — a Gold for Engineering Design and a Bronze for the most match wins.
