It's been a hectic few months for Rohit Sathe, Pritam Thopate, Sumit Yadav, Paras Pawade and Nikhat Khan. The quintet, all aged between 14 and 17 years, have been clocking in nearly 10 hours every day at The Innovation Story lab in Dadar, building a one-of-kind robot that can “catch, throw and climb”. The day we meet them over a video call, they are a few hours shy of flying to Geneva, where their masterpiece, Drona, will compete with robots from 180 countries for the big prize at the FIRST Global Challenge—known as the Olympics of the Robotics World—taking place between October 13 and 16.

There’s already a sense of nervous anticipation. Not only is it the first time that these teenagers will be participating at a global competition, they’ve never travelled out of India. The students are among the first from underprivileged backgrounds to represent the country at the international challenge. Of the five students, four of them—Sathe, Thopate, Yadav and Pawade—were part of Salaam Bombay Foundation’s (SBF) skills@school programme, which trains adolescents in effective skill-building, including robotics, while Khan is from Avasara Foundation.