NORTH ATTLEBORO — Last year, a team of area teenagers took on a challenge of protecting pedestrians. This year, their ambitions were a little bigger — trailer trucks.
Planet Robotics, a group of seventh and eighth graders from around the area, have earned an invitation to the Sesi First Lego League Challenge International Open in Rio de Janeiro in August.
Sesi, a Brazil-based non-profit organization promoting education and technology, hosts the annual competition, and every year 70 teams are invited to bring their ideas. They hail from Europe, Asia and the Middle East along with seven from various regions around the United States. This year, Planet Robotics will be one of them again.
It would be the second international competition in a row for the area group of young engineers. Last year they won the first place Breakthrough Award at the Greece Open Invitational (via Zoom, of course, due to restrictions on travel imposed by COVID). They came up with a design for a vest with bright LEDs that can make a pedestrian more visible on the roads.
This year, Planet Robotics members — with an eye to the issues facing the transportation industry — came up with the idea of using drones to help drivers of 18-wheelers back up in narrow spaces. The team programmed drones to track and follow a truck as it backs up, sending a video feed to a dashboard mounted LCD screen. Their YouTube video is at https://youtube/fuzQzHiEpGE.
“Now the driver can safely backup without any blind spots. The team thinks even if they save the driver five minutes with every docking they do, we can save 260 hours per year per truck,” according to Pallavi Naravane, the volunteer coach of the team, which meets weekly at her North Attleboro home.
The team members — who have been working together for the last five years — go to different schools, Naravane notes. Instead, she says, “They are linked by a cause.”
Naravane hopes pandemic conditions can allow the trip. “The kids are all starry-eyed about going to Brazil.”
Team members are Arnav Gupta, 13, North Attleboro; Jiaan Shah, 13, Attleboro; Vansh Mookim, age 13, North Attleboro; Aditya Naravane, age 13, North Attleboro, Ishika Kumar, age 13, Attleboro; Richaa Volety, 12, North Attleboro and Dyuthi Prashanth, 14, Walpole.
Prashanth, a student at Johnson Middle School in Walpole, comes by her interest in science and technology naturally. Both her parents (her “biggest cheerleaders,” she says) are software engineers. But it was her love of Legos that got her into the team.
“We had been looking into ships,” she says, and ways of making docking more efficient, even taking a trip to Woods Hole on Cape Cod to observe how big vessels moved.
“We saw overhead videos of ships to see how his worked and we thought, ‘What if trucks had an overhead view?’ So began a long journey,” she added.
Prashanth, who studies Indian classical dance in her free time, says she and her teammates have “been super stoked for the opportunity to go in person to an international competition. We have wanted to do it for three years.”
One reason, she says, is that “we hope to learn from other teams and make new friends. That’s always a favorite part of the experience, becoming better from working with other people, learning from their mistakes and successes.”
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