KEYSTONE PHOTOS TO RUN SOMETIME SATURDAY OR E/R ON SUNDAY, according to the Associated Press (AP).
A group of Ukrainian teenagers encountered a snag on their first visit to a renowned robotics competition for high school students from a large number of nations.
On the day they were scheduled to depart for the event in Geneva, the group only received a basic kit of technology due to the uncertainty surrounding shipping of goods to Ukraine and the caution of Ukrainian customs officials on incoming merchandise.
That set off a mad scramble to assemble their robot for the latest edition of the “First Global” contest, a three-day affair that opened Friday, in-person for the first time since the pandemic. Almost all of the 180 or so teams, representing various nations, had months to prepare their robots.
A member of the Ukrainian squad, Danylo Gladkyi, said, “We couldn’t back down because we were extremely eager to compete here and to give our country a good outcome – because it truly needs it right now.” He and his colleagues are ineligible for Ukraine’s national call-up, which enlists all men over the age of 18 to help in the war effort.
Gladkyi claimed that an international package delivery firm was having trouble reaching Ukraine, and that relying on a smaller private company to transfer the kit from Poland into Ukraine ran into problems with customs authorities. When the bottleneck was resolved last Sunday, the team was forced to scramble to make its robot ready with the intended modifications – only days before the competition started.
The event, launched in 2017 with backing from American innovator Dean Kamen, encourages young people from all corners of the globe to put their technical smarts and mechanical knowhow to challenges that represent symbolic solutions to global problems.
The focus this year is on carbon capture, a young technology that removes extra CO2 from the atmosphere that traps heat and sequesters it, frequently underground, to help combat global warming.
Teams use game controllers like those attached to consoles in millions of households worldwide to direct their self-designed robots to zip around pits, or “fields,” to scoop up hollow plastic balls with holes in them that symbolically represent carbon. A clear rectangular box packed with the balls is emptied onto the field to begin each match, setting off a whirling, hissing frenzy to pick them up.
The first objective is to pile as many balls into a tower with a funnel on top in the middle of the field. Teams can accomplish this in one of two ways: either by having the robots catapult the balls up into the funnels themselves or by instructing the robots to feed the balls into corner pockets where team members can remove them and fling them into the funnels by hand.
Every team has an interest in filling the funnel: the more collected, the more everyone benefits.
But following the frantic race to collect the balls, a second, brutal test awaits in the last 30 seconds of each session: The teams strive to guide their robots to scale short branches, or bars, at various levels along the stem of each tower by using hooks, winches, or extending arms as their preferred mechanism.
The “multiplier” of the total point value of the balls they will acquire increases as the level is advanced.
With six teams on the field, there is a race for the highest perch in order to achieve success.
The “First Global” programme intends to offer a remedy to a troubled world, where children look past politicians to help solve problems that affect everyone, by fusing competitiveness with shared interest.
With teams parading in behind their national flags and short bars of national anthems playing, the opening-day ceremony had an Olympic feel, but the young people made it clear that this was about a new kind of global high school sport in an industry that is expected to have a significant impact in the 21st century.
Many people’s attention is diverted by the competition from global problems like the current unrest in Iran and the Russian invasion of Ukraine as well as the effects of the ongoing war in Syria and famine in the Horn of Africa.
While the majority of the world’s nations participated, several did not, including Russia in particular.
Previous winners of these robotics tournaments include the Afghan girls’ squad and “Team Hope,” a group of refugees and stateless people.
At a robotics competition, teenagers take on 21st-century problems.
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