New Delhi: FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) robotics team Sigma, comprising 12 high school students from various schools of Mumbai and mentored by RFL Academy, won the most prestigious 'Inspire Award' at the recently concluded FIRST Tech Challenge Asia Pacific Invitational Championship, Sydney, held from July 13 to 16, 2023 in Macquarie University. Sigma becomes only the second Indian team in the 30 years history of this competition to win this award at an international platform.
Students of team Sigma designed, built and coded a robot capable pf grabbing cone-shaped objects from the ground level and placing them at various heights, ranging from 0.2 feet to 3 feet. The robot's capacity of stacking 20 cones in two minutes. For this Team Sigma was felicitated by Manish Gupta, the consul general of India in Sydney, at the consulate office in Sydney. He praised the team for their efforts in building an indigenous robot and making India proud at such a global platform in the field of robotics.
Besides this, Sigma has raised close to a million rupees to start and run robotics labs at four underprivileged schools, where 1500+ students from various underprivileged backgrounds are building their own robots on daily basis. Sigma has started and mentored a new two new FTC teams in this season to grow the robotics community across India. Team Sigma was also a finalist for other awards like Control Award, Design Award and Connect Award in this competition.
Guides and mentors
Atul Raut, Virendrasinh Vaghela and Seema Tare were mentoring this team at RFL Academy, Mumbai. The Team comprised Kavish Contractor, Ayaan Bhatt, Shauryaveer Varma, Vedang Agrawal, Ranveer Jain, Agastya Bhatia, Vir Sanghvi, Jashn Singh Arora, Kabir Doshi, Raj Kothari, Bhavya Sanghrajka, Drish Shah. This team also had a student mentor Kush Keswani, aiding them in their documentation and social media journey.
A total of 35 champion teams from 10 different countries including USA, Canada, China, Japan, Australia and more went on to compete for the title of Asia Pacific Championship. Team Sigma has been participating in this competition from last four years.
Ashwin Shah, Cofounder and CEO of RFL Academy informed that they intend to foster innovation, creativity, problem solving and leadership skills amongst these high school students through such robotics competitions. According to him, these students are far more technically capable than the second year engineering students in the field of CAD, Coding, Graphics, Content and beyond.
The Inspire Award
The Inspire Award is given to the team that best embodies the essence of the FIRST Tech Challenge program. They serve as exemplary ambassadors, inspiring others with their actions on and off the field. This team excels in various judged categories, demonstrating teamwork and success in robot design and construction while sharing their experiences and knowledge with others.
This year, the team won the coveted Think Award at the national chapter, held in Pune from March 10 to 12, 2023.
