Dubai students clinch title at Robot Olympiad

Fighting all odds, four Indian residents of Dubai have created something that you usually find only in sci-fi movies.

Meet Hawkeye, the unmanned flying robot and its creators, grade 12 boys, Athul Manojkumar, Aravind Sreejith, Vikram Bhatia and Mohammed Farhaj. The 4kg robot can fly up to 1km high, and can be used as surveillance equipment and a ‘tourist guide’ with geo-mapping technology.

So impressive was their invention that the boys topped at the 10th World Robot Olympiad in Jakarta, Indonesia. The four boys from Our Own High School, Al Warqa’a, emerged as the first and only team from the UAE to win the First Position in the Senior Open Category in the world.

In addition to this, the team also won the award for the ‘Best Technical Robot’ in the world in their category competing against 36 teams from various countries.

The journey started when the team was selected to represent the UAE after winning the ‘Best Robot Award’ at the National Robot Olympiad held in Abu Dhabi in May.

Mohammed Farhaj, one of the participants said: “We’ve been participating in the Olympiad for the last few years but this year, we really wanted to leave our mark. And life gets very boring sometimes. You have your daily lessons, theoretical lectures, and after we started playing with robots, it completely changed the direction our life would move in.”

This team along with help from two other students, Amal Madhu and Rohan AP, made selfless contribution to the project. Carefully monitored and strongly inspired by their teacher and coach, Rama Rao, the team began work.

This team has qualified into the world round for all the three times it has participated. “A lot of what we did was something that is completely new. We had to study a lot and the programming side especially was very hard,” said Farhaj.

He said the toughest part of the challenge was to make the robot fly using the Lego Mindstorms NXT, a programmable robotics kit released by Lego in late July 2006. “We had to change the design around because the processing speed in NXT is not up to the mark. There is a lot of information and we took about a month to understand the entire concept. Also the robot weighed about 4kgs, which made the going get tougher,” said Farhaj.

The robot was named Hawkeye after the character in the movie Avengers. “The theme set by the competition was that participants would have to create a protect, preserve and promote one world heritage site. We chose to link ours to Machu Picchu, Peru. The machine would have to coexist with the heritage site,” said Farhaj.

“So we made Hawkeye to act as a tourist guide. We geo-mapped the entire location and provided the routes to go through and added a surveillance camera that was hooked on to the robot. Several people who come as tour groups steal priceless artifacts’. The site keeps losing them.”

The boys received a lot of support from the Abu Dhabi Education Council (Adec) and the team was one among the 20 other teams that participated from the UAE.

“At one point we didn’t expect to win. One day before the project left for Indonesia, the robot kept crashing and we had very little hope. We left for Indonesia and once we were there, while randomly chatting over dinner, we changed the configuration and voila it just began working,” said Farhaj.

The four boys intend to pursue a career in robotics and are also looking for admissions to Singaporean universities and US varsities.

“This changed our lives, we 
look forward to doing a lot more with robotics,” said Farhaj. 
 dhanusha@khaleejtimes.com