The rookie robotics team from Urbana is headed to the state championships Feb. 23. In the front row, from left: Rhea Ramesh, Laila Gilsinn, Nainitha Chalamalasetty, Mihir Kumar and Roi Mahns. Standing, from left: Vidhushi Kondabathini, Praneel Pandit, Aditi Senthikumar, Vidhyuth Viswanathan, Tanish Umrikar. The team’s high school mentors are Abhi Senthilkumar, Sujal Umrikar, Geethika Kondatathini and Arush Kumar. Coaches are Senthil Ramaswamy and Vishy Mahadevan, and team administrator is Amit Kumar.
URBAN Bots, part of the Rockville Robotics Inc. team network (https://rockvillerobotics.org/teams.html), is a rookie robotics team from Urbana that competed in the ongoing FIRST Lego League competition and qualified for the Maryland FLL State Championship at UMBC on Feb. 23. They were sponsored in part by Art of Problem Solving and Booz Allen Hamilton.
FIRST Lego League is the most accessible, guided, global robotics competition, helping students and teachers to build a better future together, according to the website. The program is built around theme-based challenges to engage children ages 9 to 16 in research, problem solving, coding and engineering. The foundation of the program is the FIRST Core Values, which emphasize teamwork, discovery, and innovation.
FLL has four parts consisting of a robot competition, robot design evaluation, innovation project and demonstration of how FLL core values have guided the team through the season. The URBAN Bots team, consisting of 10 Urbana area elementary and middle school students, worked over the last six months on this year’s “City Shaper” challenge. They were mentored by three Urbana High School students and two parent coaches.
For the robot competition, the team learned how a Lego EV3 brick, motors, sensors, attachments and Mindstorms program blocks can be combined to make smart robots. At the competition, each robot has to successfully tackle as many pre-defined missions on the competition table as possible within a 150 second run. Throughout the season, they designed and tested attachments and programs that helped their robot accomplish multiple missions reliably. The URBAN Bots robot and team placed third out of 23 teams. Their simple, efficient, and repeatable design earned praise from the judges and earned them second place in the robot design evaluation part of the competition.