1st Place Win By Reston Ideaventions Academy Robotics At Nationals

RESTON, VA — Daeadelus, the robotics team from Reston's Ideaventions Academy, won First Place Overall in the Bell Advanced Vertical Robotics competition in Dallas, Texas on Saturday. The team also won First place for Best Presentation.

“I’m really proud of our collaboration as a team,” said Arya Lohia, the Daedalus' team lead. “Whenever you go to a competition there are always things that go wrong, especially at this scale. But I think we did a really good job at finding simple solutions to our problems.”

Related: Reston Robotics Team Wins Regionals, Heads To Nationals In Texas

Team Daedalus, which is made up of ninth through 12th grade students at the academy, earned a spot in this year's nationals competition winning First Place Overall at the regionals, which took place Nov. 10-11, in Arlington, Texas. They also won in the Best Overall Design and Best Presentation and Communication for the unique engineering solution to the challenged posed by this year's robotics competition.

For this year's challenge, teams had to simulate a helicopter dropping water onto a building fire. They did this by building two large drones with thermal and visual sensing and a system to drop the water, which was depicted by 25mm plastic balls. While the two drones autonomously navigated through the course, three small manually controlled drones completed additional tasks.

In addition, teams were scored on their engineering notebook and an in-person presentation of their designs and strategy to a panel of industry experts.

This was the academy's second year of competition and competing in the nationals. In last year's finals, the team brought home a second place trophy.

Due to the results of Saturday's competition, Daedalus Robotics and the other seven top teams will be participating in an exhibition match at XPONENTIAL 2024, the global conference and exhibition for autonomy, in San Diego, California.

Unanet served as a Diamond-level sponsor for Team Daedalus. DEV Technology, Arjun Malavia, and Reliance Electronics Inc. served as Gold-level sponsors and FPT Software, Manu & Prabha Malavia, 3G Federal Solutions LLC, and The Transport Group acted as Silver-level sponsors, and the STEM Student Leadership Association (registration sponsor).