South Fayette robotics team places second at international competition
Nav Shrivastava, 7, works with the Robo Disruptors’ robot during the FLL Razorback Invitational International Tournament at the University of Arkansas.
Parv, left, and Nav Shrivastava are coached by their mother, Nidhi.
Nav and Parv Shrivastava participated in the FLL Razorback Invitational International Tournament.
You’re familiar with Legos, those small, interlocking plastic pieces that you snap together to make a multicolored cube.
You may not be as familiar with, say, the Lego Mindstorms kits of the 21st century, which allow you – or more likely, your grandchildren – to build genuine, go-take-care-of-business robots.
Actually, the Denmark-based Lego Group’s foray into robotics dates to before the turn of the millennium. In 1998, the company formed a partnership with a U.S. organization called For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology to develop the FIRST Lego League.
Today, nearly a quarter of a million youngsters throughout the world participate in the league’s robotics competitions, including some South Fayette Township students who recently exhibited their technological expertise on a global stage.
Brothers Parv and Nav Shrivastava of the Robo Disruptors team – their mom, Nidhi, is the coach – won second place for robot design at the FLL Razorback Invitational International Tournament in May at the University of Arkansas. They were chosen for the honor among 72 teams representing 13 countries.
“It was really exciting to represent Pittsburgh at an international event in Arkansas,” Parv, 14, said. “I think the best part about the tournament was meeting all the teams and seeing how their imagination and creativity were used in so many of their ideas.”
The Robo Disruptors were invited to the Razorback event after being named grand champion at a statewide competition held in January at La Roche College in McCandless.
Each year, the FLL releases a challenge to teams, based on a real-world scientific topic. The 2015-16 challenge was “Trash Trek,” with participants directed “to make less trash or improve the way people handle the trash we make,” according to the league’s rules for the project.
“They build a robot, apply their engineering skills and actually make the robot autonomous, sending it out in the field to complete different missions,” Nidhi Shrivastava explained.
The “field” is a roughly 4-by-8-foot tabletop on which the robots operate. In “Trash Trek” competitions, their tasks include the likes of separating variously colored Lego blocks representing recyclables, compostable materials and bound-for-the-landfill trash.
Along with robots’ design, a key to competing successfully is programming. The Robo Disruptors created something known as a PID – that stands for proportional, integral and derivative – line follower.
Parv put all that in layman’s terms: “
“It’s just like a simple way of automating a task,” he explained. “That really increases our accuracy for missions.”
His brother, who is 7 and just finished second grade, already has been learning concepts about robotics and programming at South Fayette Elementary School.
“I like to be on the team so I can build robots,” Nav said about his participation in the Robo Disruptors. And about the Arkansas competition, he told about his favorite part: “I enjoyed the robot alliance challenge, which was two teams competing in a robot game.”
He and Parv also have enjoyed another aspect of participating in the FLL.
“As a team, they make outreach a big priority to get more kids involved with STEM,” their mother said about education focusing on science, technology, engineering and mathematics. “So they pulled out all the stops to support STEM and organized various robotics workshops and events to educate and inspire over 200 students this year.”
Parv, who will be a freshman at South Fayette High School, spoke about his own involvement in the FIRST Lego League:
“The FLL experience has brought out the best of me, much how a prism brings out the best part of light.”