“They could’ve been playing football in the park or video games at the local entertainment center like most kids their age, you know? Instead, this group of young boys spends hours after school and over the weekends working towards a cleaner, safer and better tomorrow,” says Nikolay Smetanin, Mentor of Team Russia and Teacher at Robomaster Club.

Team Russia is presenting FEDOR the robot at the First Global Challenge 2019 in Dubai, organized by Dubai Future Foundation. Running from 24 to 27 October at Festival Arena under the theme ‘Ocean Opportunities: United by land, connected by oceans’, the global robotics and artificial intelligence competition has brought together over 1,500 youth participants from 191 countries in a battle against ocean pollution.

“FEDOR’s name means ‘God’s gift’ in Greek, and we really believe the concept of FEDOR is a gift that nations the world over could adopt in helping to clean up their environment,” says Egor Naumov, 15, Team Captain and Co-programmer/Engineer.

Capable of picking up and disposing of rubbish commonly found in parks, streets, beaches and other outdoor spaces, the robustly built robot has been designed to assist in tackling the large amount of waste generated by humans.

With his parents working as programmers, Egor lives in a household that has a deep appreciation for coding and computers in general. Growing up, he loved playing with Legos. “I loved the endless possibilities Legos presented, and I knew from then on that I loved building,” he says. Having found a hobby that combines his love for computers and building, his ambition is now to become a robotics programmer and keep building “great stuff”.

But the road doesn’t stop there for these young geniuses that are set to take the future by storm. “We love what we’ve done with FEDOR, however, in the months ahead, we plan to make him waterproof so that he’s water-mobile and is able to reduce the large amount of waste found in the sea,” says Dmitri Koshkin, 15, a proficient user of a plethora of computer programming languages, such as Java, C++, Python and Pascal.

All the members of Team Russia hail from the same town, and three of them study in the same class. Having spent over two months on the project, they often engage in discussions about the future of robotics and its various applications.

Egor says: “Innovation in AI and robotics is already helping the world solve so many problems, and we truly believe that if we invest more time in robotics, our future is secure. Because robotics and AI represent a bulk of what the future holds, and is where we as a society are headed.”

Incidentally, FEDOR also has a famous namesake – Fedor Emelianenko, a popular Russian heavyweight mixed martial arts champion. Now we’ll just have to wait and see whether our favorite heavyweight environment-friendly robot remains true to his name, and helps us win the battle against ocean pollution.