Twelve-year-old Kavya Vignesh and her team have opted for a crowd-funding platform to fuel their project which aims to save honey bees. The campaign raced to 70 per cent of its goal in the first 48 hours. By Ankita Jain
What steps would you take if you see a beehive in your houseIJ Many would call the pest control service and burn the hive. This would result in killing of about 20-80,000 bees. Well to build a solution that can safely relocate the beehive without harming the bees, 12-year-old Kavya Vignesh and her team have come up with Bee Saver Bot. It is a solution that takes down beehives without harming any humans or bees in households and high rise buildings.
“It scans the beehive and relocates it by building an enclosure that safely encloses the beehive and transports it to the nearest bee farm. We achieve our goal of saving bees using a combination of high tech robotics and a community awareness drive,” said Delhi-based Kavya who is seeking support to help put India on the global map in the field of robotics through crowd-funding. She along with her team Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (all under 13) is India’s youngest ever team to qualify for the First lego league-European Open championship in Denmark scheduled in May. “I didn’t want to burden my family for my competition expenses so tried crowd-funding my project,” she shared. The campaign raced to 70 per cent of its goal in the first 48 hours through an online platform fueladream.
Today, people have moved from treating the question ‘Why would anyone pay for meIJ’ apprehensively, to something that has a logical answer. Just like Kavya did. The question had her brainstorm for weeks, until she came up with reasons how the project would contribute to the society. “First, it builds awareness about the importance of bees. Awareness is the first step towards change. Second, if bees are saved, so are humans and the entire ecosystem. lastly, bees all over the world are disappearing for various reasons but there is lack of awareness amongst us about their importance. If we can stop bees from dying and make people aware that they are important to the ecosystem, we help the society with more crop production and increased food amounts in the world,” she explained.
So what inspired her to take up this projectIJ “We chose honey bees, because they are mostly overlooked. Bees are mostly killed by humans through pesticides, colony collapse disorder and many more ways. We also learnt that more than 85 per cent of the world’s crops are pollinated by honey bees. Every third bite of food comes from a bee pollinated crop or animal that depends on bee pollination. As a part of the research we visited a bee keeping farm and training centre in Uttar Pradesh and learnt all about bees.”
She chose to study robotics to keep her occupied during summer vacations. “I have been practising robotics since I was nine. I have also won several medals and competitions in robotics over the past three years (Delhi Regional robotics championship 2015 and 2016). And will now represent India in the forthcoming First lego league (Fll) — robotics international competition.”
So did they build the Bee Saver BotIJ “Our robot is super cool. We call it the lightning McQueen, not only because it is red in color but also because no matter how many problems it faces, it is fixed back to perfection. We tried to make it as multitasking as possible in the least amount of time. To build our robot, we have used lego Mindstorms EV3. We are using EV3 large motors, color sensors that are used for line following, gyro sensor to take accurate turns, and pneumatics for multi-tasking. The pneumatics are just like hydraulics, they store the air in them and then use it for various tasks. Our robot consists of simple mechanisms such as gear mechanisms, incline planes, and lever mechanisms. We did so to minimise the use of motors during the tasks,” she elaborated.
The six-person team also has two adults who are advisors and experts from Delhi accompanying them. The kids have to bear their cost plus the costs of the two other and hence the crowd-funding campaign from Kavya. She is raising funds as she needs about Rs2.40 lakhs to fund the costs of travel, food, entry, equipment and gear.