A Ghanaian team made up of nine girls dubbed ‘Team Acrobot’ has emerged winner at a global robotics competition.
The nine girls who are high school students inspired by a Ghanaian who works for NASA beat teams from South Korea, Mexico, the USA to clinch first position.
The global robotics competition which is aimed at discovering and rewarding some of the finest innovations in robotics all over the world took place in the United States in May. Expectedly, It paraded some of the best talents and innovations in the field of robotics.
Against all odds, having to wear the label of the ‘underdog’ the all-girls robotics team from Ghana pulled a big surprise as they beat the favorites to claim top spot.
The Robofest World Champions school in the Methodist Girls’ High School in Ghana’s eastern region. According to reports the girls with a lot of team effort and hard work distinguished themselves in the 10 broad and challenging categories of the championship held at the Lawrence Technological University (LTU), Southfield, Michigan.
Among the categories were Game (Complete robotic missions), Exhibition (Show off projects), Vision Centric Challenge (Develop robots to solve problems using cameras), Unknown Mission Challenge (Surprise missions), RoboArts (Robotics music, dance and arts competition), BottleSumo (Pushing bottle or opponents off a table), RoboParade (Parade of robots), as well as Camps, Carnival and WISER; a conference on STEM education through robotics.
The girls built a robot capable of arranging boxes according to a binary number that was allotted to the team during the competition. The team performed every task given with composure and also in good time.Team Acrobot outshone other team for its ingenuity and subsequently took home the top prize.
In recent times, Ghana has been striving to develop the field of robotics and in January this year, the team qualified from the national championship level called the Robotics Inspired Education (RISE) competition.
The domestic robotics contest was launched by the Ghana Robotics Academy Foundation (GRAF) from which Team Acrobot qualified after beating other teams in the country.
The GRAF was founded by Dr. Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu; one of the top robotics engineers on the planet who has even had some of his creations support expeditions into outer space. The creation of the GRAF was aimed at inspiring a new generation of young Africans to pursue developments in the field of robotics; one that has seen him even manage extraterrestrial exploits.
Trebi-Ollenu works National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as the Chief Engineer and Technical Group Leader for the Mobility and Manipulation group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He is one of the lead engineers behind NASA’s Mars Rover and InSight projects.
The first Robofest competition took place in 1999 and according to the organizers has attracted over 25000 students including students selected from 14 U.S. States, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Ecuador, Egypt, England, France, Ghana, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Lebanon, Macau, Mexico, Singapore, South Africa, and South Korea.
The competition seeks to offer students the opportunity to master principles of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) as well as Computer Science (CS), communication, critical thinking, teamwork, while helping students develop problem-solving skills through the design, construction, and programming of robots.
