PISCATAWAY, NJ – Aditi Gopalakrishnan, a 10th grader from Piscataway won first place at the national RoboCup Junior Onstage USA Competition held at Wardlaw Hartridge School in Edison on May 19.
RoboCupJunior OnStage is a competition that integrates science, technology, engineering, and the arts. Teams of two to five students presented a 1-2 minute creative stage performance using autonomous robots they designed, built, and programmed.
The OnStage challenge was open-ended, which allowed the performers to use robots and present any performing art they wanted including music, dance, and theater. Teams were judged based on a video submission explaining their projects, technical design interviews, and a live demonstration.
As captain of Team JAM Session, Aditi collaborated with two fellow robotics enthusiasts, Julia Chen and Maya Baireddy to compete in the Open Category for ages 14-19.
They created an interactive art piece designed to increase awareness about sign language. Their robot was a "musician" which played piano music based on hand signals. The team trained and used machine learning models to recognize American Sign Language (ASL) hand gestures, and used a Raspberry Pi device as a controller to orchestrate the robot's "fingers" to play the piano. The fingers were custom-designed and 3D printed. The concept, build, and software integration were completed over 6-9 months.
Aditi is an avid robotics enthusiast who believes technology has the ability to empower human lives and deliver improvements in healthcare. This is Aditi's third year participating in the RoboCup Junior competition. Last year, her team placed third overall and won the best algorithm in the Rescue Line category, which challenged robots to navigate through debris and obstacles to conduct a rescue mission.
Aditi also teaches and mentors middle schoolers interested in robotics. Last summer, she mentored a team of students who won 1st place at the national NASA ZeroRobotics competition.
Get updates delivered to you daily. Free and customizable.
It’s essential to note our commitment to transparency:
Our Terms of Use acknowledge that our services may not always be error-free, and our Community Standards emphasize our discretion in enforcing policies. As a platform hosting over 100,000 pieces of content published daily, we cannot pre-vet content, but we strive to foster a dynamic environment for free expression and robust discourse through safety guardrails of human and AI moderation.
Most Popular
Comments / 0