A group of students from the UAE, who have built a robot that can detect microplastics in food, are now headed to Athens in Greece where they will represent the country at an Olympics-style robotics competition.
The team of over 22 youngsters from various schools in Dubai have been designing, building and programming the robot for the competition for over three months now. The international robotics competition called FIRST Global Challenge (FGC) will be held later this month.
Emirati student Saif Alsaedi, who is among the students who has built the robot, said: “A good part of the project is something called new technology experience which requires us to use AI and machine learning to program our robots to perform certain tasks.”
That is where the team built the robot that detects microplastics. The competition also requires us to work on various other tasks,” the 16-year-old told Khaleej Times.
Their prototype uses advanced machine learning to identify and classify microplastics in different food samples, addressing an important health and environmental issue.
This will be the second time that students of Unique World Robotics (UWR) will participate in the competition. “The team has also designed and built a robot that can collect water and energy elements and accurately place them,” said Bansan Thomas George, founder of UWR.
“This required careful engineering and programming to ensure the robot could move around the field, securely handle the elements, and drop them off precisely.”
Fifteen-year-old Dhriti Gupta, part of the group that will travel to Athens, participated in the competition last year as well, when the team was placed 29th out of 191 countries. “It is an Olympic-style game and we work with different countries to score points,” she said. “At the competition, our robot needs to go around and collect food and energy points in the form of green and blue balls.”
The group ranging from 14- to 17-year-olds will participate in the international robotics competition FIRST Global Challenge (FGC) where the theme of the year is feeding the future. The annual contest, organised by US-based nonprofit public charity FIRST Global, hopes to nurture cross-cultural communication and cooperation among high-school students around the world through STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).
Dhriti said the entire competition has been a learning experience. “The biggest lesson has been teamwork,” she said. “I learnt to communicate with different people from different backgrounds, collaborating with people I have never met before and pooling together ideas to execute them to get one final solution to the problem.”
Bansan said he has very high expectations from the team. “They have worked so hard and put in so much effort and time,” he said. “We are hoping that they will be able to break into the top ten. We are trying really hard. However, our prime focus is to give our students valuable learning experience so that they can develop their talent for robotics.”
Robotics has been a field that has seen an increased interest from students in the past few years with many schools now beginning to integrate it into their daily learning. For many students, the field is a gateway into achieving bigger dreams.
Starting to build using small lego, Saif has been working with robotics for over three years. “My dream is to create my own life-sized version of Terminator,” he said. “I have been learning to do more complex codes and I really enjoy it.”
© Khaleej Times
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