‘It was an insane feeling’: Naperville-based, all-girls robotics team headed to international competition

When the Naperville-based team Robot Penguin took fourth place in the World Robot Olympiad Americas Open Championship in Panama last year, the newly formed all-girls team had been working out of a three-car garage that could feel a bit cramped at times.

“In the garage, I remember we’d have like a bunch of fans for the robots and for the humans just like completely set up all around,” Hamsini Chennupati, 14, said. “It would be extremely cold in the winter or when it rained, we could hear the garage door getting pelted with rain.”

Luckily, that wasn’t the case this year for Hamsini and her teammates Ananyaa Karthik and Sweera Kshitij Sharma. The group, alongside their organization Launchpad Robo Lab, now work out of a real lab with more space and brighter lighting. But a new lab was not the only change for the Neuqua Valley High School girls.

On Aug. 9, Robot Penguin won first place in the World Robot Olympiad Affiliate Cup’s robosports category at Northern Illinois University, securing a spot at the World Robot Olympiad International Final in Puerto Rico in December.

The International Final is considered the “pinnacle” of World Robot Olympiad competitions, Robot Penguin’s head coach Kshitij Sharma said, noting that the contest brings together thousands of students from about 100 different countries.

“We had already built this foundation, and we just wanted to prove ourselves further that we do belong at an international stage,” Sweera, 14, said.

For the team, however, the win was more than just an accomplishment, their coach noted. It was a statement on what is possible for all-girls teams in a field that is predominantly male-dominated.

“Being an all-girls team, it just made it slightly more special,” Hamsini said. “One of the judges even came up to us and they were so excited that we were an all-girls team. I think the amount of effort and hard work we put into this really shows off.”

Robot Penguin spent roughly seven to eight months building their machines for another year of playing robot doubles tennis.

In that game, each team has two robots on the court that move autonomously. This year’s version of the game included four orange balls and one purple. Orange balls are worth one point each, while the purple ball is worth negative two points. The goal is to keep as many orange balls on the opponent’s side as possible while keeping the purple on your team’s side. The team with the lowest score wins.

Instead of the game being two minutes long as it was last year, timing ranged from anywhere between one to two minutes with five-second intervals added, a new challenge for the group.

“So your total match duration could be one minute five seconds, or one minute 35 seconds, or anything between,” the coach said. “So that means that your robot has to be smarter (and) better, because you can’t simply bank on, ‘Oh, at the two-minute mark when the score is going to get counted, I’m going to do this last trick that will outsmart my competition.’”

The girls focused on two major aspects for their robots this year. First was building a motor that would allow the bot to move around the court more quickly, something that cost them a win last year. Second was learning how to code in Python, a more complex language none of them had worked in before but would allow them to create a more effective camera.

“At the start of the season, obviously we were a little bit worried because … there’s so many new things to (this challenge) and so many problems that we did have to tackle,” Ananyaa, 16, said. “But our mindset was that we wanted to take things step-by-step and just work on what we could do in the moment, and using that mindset, we were able to overcome so many different obstacles and challenges.”

That included day one of the Affiliate Cup, where the girls landed in second-to-last place due to issues with the camera and the robots toppling over. After a less-than-stellar showing, they stayed up until 2 a.m. to work on fixing the issues. Going into that second day was nerve-wracking, Ananyaa said.

“But putting all that work in throughout the night of that day, we also gained a lot of trust in ourselves and more confidence because we, that night, solved multiple issues,” she said.

But the work was not completely done. Over the next few days, the girls would do everything from tinkering with their code minutes before a match to practicing in-between games even when other teams were busy celebrating.

“Whenever we run our robots, we all put our hands out and we push ourselves backward so that we don’t touch the table,” Sweera said. “It seems small and insignificant, but it’s (to remind ourselves) that we are not thinking of just ourselves, but we’re thinking of our whole team as one in that moment.”

That hard work — and trust in each other — paid off in the final rounds of the tournament, when they clutched the win away from a California team with much more sophisticated robots.

Even after receiving their trophies and on the road back home, the competitive spirit did not subside for Robot Penguin. Their coach said the girls could not stop talking about all the changes they wanted to make to their robots ahead of the international final in December.

It took a few days for their accomplishment to sink in.

“After winning, I was just so disoriented for a bit,” Hamsini said. “Just believing that we won took me two days and two naps just to figure out, like, ‘Oh, we actually won.’ It was an insane feeling.”

cstein@chicagotribune.com