All-Girls Robotic Team From Ghana Wins World Robofest Championship

Source: https://www.ebony.com/news/race-culture/girls-robotic-team-ghana-wins-world-robofest-championship/
https://face2faceafrica.com/article/all-girls-robotics-team-from-ghana-wins-world-robofest-championship-in-the-u-s

ACROBOT, an all-girls robotics team from Ghana, won the 2019 World Robofest Championship, “a festival of competitions with autonomous robots,” according to its website. The contest took place at Lawrence Technological University (LTU) in Southfield, Michigan, from May 16 to 18 2019.

According to the pan-African media company Face 2 Face Africa, the team is comprised of nine girls from the Methodist Girls’ High School in the eastern region of the West African country.

ACROBOT beat out teams from Mexico, the United States, Egypt, South Korea, South Africa, and dozens of others in all 10 categories.  The categories include the 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), Camps, Carnival and WISER, a conference on STEM education through robotics.  ACROBOT also successfully built a robot and used the binary number given during the competition to have it organize boxes.

The U.S. Embassy of Ghana congratulated the girls for winning in a tweet posted on May 21. “Congratulations to Team ACROBOT. . .We are proud to partner with the Ghana Robotics Academy Foundation to promote STEM education,” it wrote under a photo of the team.

The girls’ team was not the only competitors from Ghana; there was also a boys’ collective called Team Cosmic Intellect that was a participant of the contest’s junior division. The boys’ team came in sixth place among the 52 teams competing in Robofest.

The two teams qualified from the national championship level called the Robotics Inspired Science Education (RISE) competition organized by the Ghana Robotics Academy Foundation in January. They beat several teams before qualifying for the World Robofest Championship.

 

The Ghana Robotics Academy Foundation was founded by Dr. Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu, the Ghanaian robotics engineer at NASA and 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.

Robofest has been organized since 1999 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, and problem solving skills while designing, constructing, and programming robots.

Since Robofest started, over 25,000 students have competed 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 teams compete in the junior, senior and college divisions.

All registered participants received medals and personalized certificates while winners of qualifying and championship rounds received trophies.

This 26-year-old Nigerian is now the highest paid robotics engineer in the world

Source: https://face2faceafrica.com/article/this-26-year-old-nigerian-is-now-the-highest-paid-robotics-engineer-in-the-world

A 26-year-old Nigerian, credited for building the world’s first gaming robot, has just become the highest paid in the field of Robotic engineering.  Silas Adekunle achieved this feat after signing a new deal with the world’s reputable software manufacturers, Apple Inc.  The robotics engineer was also named as “Someone to Watch in 2018” by the Black Hedge Fund Group, according to reports by thebossnewspapers.com.

Adekunle is currently the founder and CEO of Reach Robotics, a company developing the world’s first gaming robots.  He also recently graduated with a 1st class degree and has four years’ background in robotics.

Born in Lagos, Nigeria, Adekunle studied in Nigeria before relocating to the UK as a teenager.
After completing his secondary school education, he proceeded to the University of the West of England where he graduated with a first class graduate in Robotics.

In 2013, he founded Reach Robotics and developed a lot of experience on robotics within a space of four years.  Adekunle was also a team leader of Robotics In Schools program, a program which encourages and pays attention to students in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).

The program encouraged him to develop robotics to make education more entertaining for STEM students.  In 2017, MekaMon, he released the world’s first gaming robot, with the special ability to customize the gaming bot to perform personalized functions.

The initial launch of Mekamon sold 500 bots, generating $7.5 million, according to The Guardian.
Following this feat, Adekunle received support from various organizations including London Venture Partners ($10 million) and in the same year, his company, Reach Robotics signed a deal with Apple securing exclusive sales in Apple stores.

“Impressed by the quality of his robots and their ability to show emotion with subtly-calibrated movements, Apple priced his four-legged “battle-bots” at $300 and has put them in nearly all of its stores in the United States and Britain.

“Early customers skew towards male techies but a growing number of parents are buying the robots for their children to get them interested in STEM, Adekunle told Forbes in an interview this year.
The young entrepreneur who once indicated that the secrets to his success are “balance, shared ideas, time management and being oneself”, was recently listed in the 2018 Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe: Technology.

Adekunle, who has taken over the world with his inventiveness, is currently located at the Bristol Robotics Lab which is said to be the best robotics research center in the UK.