Kids learn lessons in collaboration, creativity as toy robots slug it out

Coimbatore: Autonomous robotic vehicles built with Lego blocks moved on a mat filled with plastic blocks and balls. Mechanical arms extended from them, trying to pick up the blocks. While some failed and knocked down the blocks, others succeeded and moved on to the next objective.
The robots were built by school students, who participated in the First Lego League (FLL), an international competition conducted by Denmark-based Lego Education and FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) in the city on Sunday.

Twenty-four teams from across Tamil Nadu participated in the regional-level competition, the theme of which was ‘Into Orbit’.

“We started to build the robot three months ago. As we could spend time on them only after the school hours and during the weekends, it took us about 15 days to feed commands for a single task,” said M Vignesh Velan, a Class XI student from the Sacred Heart Higher Secondary School on the outskirts of Villupuram.

“Based on a map that showed the objectives, we planned and programmed the robot with information like how long it has to move, where to turn and what action to perform. We had to study the map in detail and programme the movements of the robot accurately. Any deviation, even by a few millimetres, would collapse everything.”

V Navaneethan, who constructed the robot, said that as the team lacked the experience to participate in the competition, they were knocked out of several times due to violation of norms. “We learnt the techniques from the internet with the help of our coach, Siva Kumar,” he said.

As the robot could do multiple tasks simultaneously, the team completed four tasks within 29 seconds, while the other teams had completed only one or two tasks, said Siva.

Programming and feeding information into the robots is more like playing games, thanks to Lego Mindstorms, a hardware-software platform produced by Lego, said K Karan, a student from the Thoraipakkam Government Higher Secondary School in Chennai.

Eleven teams will be selected for the national-level event scheduled to take place in Bengaluru on February 23. The winner of the national-level event will participate in the finals in the US.