Three Naperville teens are making a name for themselves in the world of robotics and showing other young girls they can do the same.
Ananyaa Karthik, Sweera Kshitij Sharma, and Hamsini Chennupati, all part of a robotics team, “Robot Penguin,” recently secured fourth place in the World Robotics Olympiad Americas Open Robosports Championship, becoming the first U.S. team to ever make it to the semifinals in the competition.
With two autonomous robots, the girls defeated several teams from around the world during the three-day competition in Panama in October.
“We were going against these very highly competitive teams like Vietnam, Korea and even Canada. They’re all very competitive and have a tradition of winning in these types of competitions…Not only were we going against all of these advanced teams, but we were also an all-girls team. And I think it just brought us a lot of pride,” said Sharma.
Teens band together to form Robot Penguin Robotics team
Sharma, a freshman at Neuqua Valley High School, has been involved in robotics since she was about 10 years old after receiving a robot mouse as a Christmas present years earlier from her father, Kshitij. As she grew older, she developed a passion for the field and began competing in robotics competitions, with him as her coach.
Kshitij is the founder of Launchpad Robo Lab, where he provides the same robotics coaching to other young students. 14-year-old Chennupati, an eighth grader at Crone Middle School, and Karthik, 15, a sophomore at Neuqua, joined the lab at the beginning of the summer. Like Sharma, the girls have been involved in robotics for a few years, part of their middle school robotics clubs; however, they had never competed in World Robotics Olympiad events until this year.
“I was originally on a team with Sweera for my school robotics team. I found out that she’d been doing this for a while, and I kind of wanted to join her and see where it took me,” said Chennupati.
Eager to grow their skills, the two girls joined Sharma at the robo lab, forming the team Robot Penguin, a name they took on to “reflect their technical precision and team spirit,” according to Kshitij. Soon after, the three friends began crafting their bots for upcoming contests.
Robots compete in double tennis challenge
They utilized Pybricks, a tool used to program LEGO robots using Python. With this, they were able to create two autonomous robots with flippers to compete in the WRO challenge of double tennis.
In the game, each team has two robots playing on a field with eight orange balls and two purple balls. The main objective of the game is for the robots to find and shoot the orange balls to their opponent’s side of the field while keeping the purple ones on their side. Orange balls are counted as one, and purple balls as -2.
“The lower the points, the better…But there’s more to it than just shooting balls. The fields are different. You have to use a bunch of sensors to make sure a robot doesn’t cross over a red line, which gets you disqualified,” said Karthik.
Teens succeed at US Open
Overall, the building process took about a month before their first competition on Aug. 3 in DeKalb, the U.S. Open.
There, the teens finished in second place, qualifying them for the international competition in Panama. With two months until then, they regularly made improvements to their robot, including implementing a camera.
“We were able to incorporate a camera, which is mainly there to be able to detect the color of the purple ball…to sense the color of the ball and also where it is on the field, because every match it’s changed. It’s by the roll of a die, so you never know where it’s going to go. And you want to make sure that it’s going to be able to detect it, and capture it,” said Chennupati.
They continuously made additions to the robot up until they arrived in Panama for the big showdown from Oct. 17 to 19.
Dozens of students from around the world filled the Panama Convention Center, and at this point, nerves began setting in for the three friends, but Sharma said they remained confident in their work.
“I think when I feel nervous, I just know that I do care about this. And that nervousness definitely shows that I care,” she said.
Robot Penguin team finishes fourth
Each day of the competition, students were allotted a certain amount of time to make any last-minute fixes to their robots before placing them in “quarantine,” meaning no more changes could be made. Then, it was time to face off against one another.
Robot Penguin beat several teams over two days, boosting themselves to the semifinals and earning a fourth-place finish.
Although they hoped to place higher, the girls said they were proud of their hard work and perseverance.
“I’m really happy and proud that we were able to represent the U.S. and especially like an all-girls team, and it also helps the idea that more girls should go into robotics and STEM,” said Karthik.
A new WRO season kicks off next month, and specific challenges for 2026 will be announced at that time. The games could change or stay the same as in 2025, according to the students.
Regardless of what the new season brings, Robot Penguin plans to come back better than ever.
“We learned from our mistakes from the past competition, and it would be a really good opportunity to make our robot a lot better…and hopefully take it for the win,” said Chennupati.
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