Five Mumbai teens from underprivileged homes, who are in Geneva to represent India at the robotics challenge, speak to mid-day about why their mean machine is one-of-a-kind
Rohit Sathe, Pritam Thopate, Sumit Yadav, Paras Pawade and Nikhat Khan—who are representing India at the FIRST Global Challenge in Geneva—have been working on Drona the robot since June
It's been a hectic few months for Rohit Sathe, Pritam Thopate, Sumit Yadav, Paras Pawade and Nikhat Khan. The quintet, all aged between 14 and 17 years, have been clocking in nearly 10 hours every day at The Innovation Story lab in Dadar, building a one-of-kind robot that can “catch, throw and climb”. The day we meet them over a video call, they are a few hours shy of flying to Geneva, where their masterpiece, Drona, will compete with robots from 180 countries for the big prize at the FIRST Global Challenge—known as the Olympics of the Robotics World—taking place between October 13 and 16.
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There’s already a sense of nervous anticipation. Not only is it the first time that these teenagers will be participating at a global competition, they’ve never travelled out of India. The students are among the first from underprivileged backgrounds to represent the country at the international challenge. Of the five students, four of them—Sathe, Thopate, Yadav and Pawade—were part of Salaam Bombay Foundation’s (SBF) skills@school programme, which trains adolescents in effective skill-building, including robotics, while Khan is from Avasara Foundation.
“It feels like a dream,” says Sathe, a Class XII student and resident of Kannawar Nagar 2 in Vikhroli East. He is pursuing an Arts degree at Ramnivas Ruia Junior College in Matunga. Sathe, who won gold at the India Skills Competition 2021 (state level) for Mobile Robotics and was instrumental in developing the Cargo Robot for the First Tech Challenge (FTC), was in Class IX when he was roped in by SBF for their STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) programme. Sathe leads this team as strategist, while the rest have been given other specific robot-handling tasks—Yadav will be the constructor, Thapate is the programmer, and Pawade and Khan are the drivers of the robot, controlling all the action on field.
The team has been working on the project for over a year, but started training specifically for the competition from June under Meenal Majumder, the founder of The Innovation Story. She guided and mentored the teens on robotics design using CAD. “They wanted to get into the depth of what they were learning, and were ready to put in the hours,” she says. The push, says Majumder, came when they were selected as finalists for the FTC competition in Pune. That’s when they were ready to take on something bigger, she thinks.
The team to represent FGC 2022 was selected by the STEM Education Trust of India, following a stringent selection process involving highly experienced robotics student-teams—41 of them—from across the country.
For the competition, the participating team was given a basic kit that mentioned certain specifications about what kind of robot they had to create—this included, the weight and height limitations, and the tasks expected of it. “We had to make a robot that was 50 x 50 cm in dimension. How we designed and constructed it, was entirely our innovation,” explains Sathe. “For instance, one of the tasks involved shooting [the ball in a pit], so we knew we had to include a shooter into our design. Similarly, if the robot had to be driven for a certain length of time, [and] we had to include a mechanism that would make this possible.”
The team presenting Drona at the FIRST Global Challenge in Geneva, Switzerland
The final robot was a result of permutations and combinations. Thopate, a resident of Sector 16, Kopar Khairane and a class XII student of Ramanand Aarya DAV college (Bhandup), says their robot’s unique chassis—the structural component which contains the drive train and allows the robot to be mobile by using wheels etc—was made without plastic frames. “This gave us room to include more parts. For the shooter, we used a double flywheel... one at the bottom and the other at the top. Both rotate in opposite directions and were set at different speeds [this aided in shooting],” he shares.
Building the final prototype, however, took a long time. “Our first one used a single motor, but the machine couldn’t climb too high, which was a prerequisite for the competition. So, we had to shift to a two-motor machine. Troubleshooting saw us through,” Thopate explains. Naming their machine after the guru of the Kauravas and the Pandavas was a natural choice, because “our robot is just as skilled... it can shoot, climb and move great distances”.
The teenagers share a video over the call in which Yadav—a resident of Sai Shraddha Chawl, Sardar Nagar No. 4, GTB Nagar and the youngest teammate studying in Class X at Gurunanak High School—places a ball next to the robot which it picks up, and shoots into a pit ahead. In another video, Drona drives towards a pillar, and strategically hoists itself up, climbing one bar at a time. “At the competition, the robot will earn points for each bar it climbs,” explains Sathe. The team will also be judged for designing, programming, construction and mobility.
Khan, whose home is on Tulinj Road, Nallasopara, claims she’s the odd one out. A class XI Science student from Mt Carmel School and Junior College, Khan shares how she often questioned her interest in robotics. “I was always the only girl in my class who seemed interested.” For the longest time, she wanted to pursue medicine, but a chance exposure to robotics during the pandemic-induced lockdown made her curious. “I was bored, and wanted to try something new,” she says. “During this time, I got an opportunity to enrol for a robotics course at The Innovation Story, through Avasara Foundation. As I learnt how to design using CAD, I began experimenting further.” Khan later went on to participate in an all-girls team at the FTC 2022. She admits experiencing apprehension when told she’d be representing India with four other boys. “I had so many questions,” she says. “I wasn’t sure if I would be taken seriously. But we quickly got down to business... everyone’s opinions mattered.”
She couldn’t have been happier about co-creating Drona. “I am very proud of our robot. Sometimes, I wonder, ‘Did we really make this?’ I think we have a fighting chance at the competition.”
Sathe says robotics has given him a purpose. “I wasn’t a good student, but now I feel naturally inclined to study and read. I finally know I am good at something,” he says. He hopes to become a cyber security officer because “India will need more minds to fight cyber crimes in the future”. Thopate says he wants to become a software engineer. “But I will never let go of robotics. I will teach other kids as well... maybe it will help them like it helped me.”
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