Four University of the South Pacific students brought home the Tokyo Electron Award at the 2022 Asia Pacific Robocon contest that was held in India.
The award is normally given to a dedicated team that features a good desired shooting level during their duration of showcase. In this case, it was the USP team.
The students joined in virtually for almost 11 hours on Sunday, August 21.
Arshaque Ali, Shahil Kumar, Salveen Deo and Shail Prasad are final year degree students majoring in electrical engineering.
USP Senior lecturer in Mechanical Engineering, Doctor Sumesh Narayan commended the student’s efforts saying that they had trademarked the university’s engineering programme to the world.
He said the victory was important, it allowed the students to be exposed to international competitions.
The four students spent 22 weeks preparing for the competition, what sets these four students’ distinctiveness was the tireless effort they had invested.
Through personal sacrifice and patriotism to represent their country, these Fijian students persevered and concurred with succession amidst odds met along the way.
“This victory is built upon our hard work, we created our robots from the components used from previous competitions,” Mr Ali said.
“We hadn’t actually bought any new components for this robot, we improvised with the resources that were available and a lesson here is, there is no excuse to execute what your passion is about.”
During their first year, these four students used to stand and watch as their seniors performed their technological art.
Surfing on what they had seen, the four students didn’t think twice of entering the competition this year as they wanted to now stamp their names in advance.
“For the four of us, it was a dream from our first year to participate in an international competition,” he said.
“During the competition, we made sure we were focused on the task that was there.
“Building toward the end of the competition, we were initially packing our stuff to go home when we heard, ‘this award goes to Fiji’.”
USP was the only university in the Pacific region that participated last Sunday among 13 other universities in the Asia-Pacific region.
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