Rohan Agrawal has created a buzz in Silicon Valley.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: An Indian American prodigy is taking Silicon Valley by storm, and the most surprising part it is that he’s not even a teenager yet.
Twelve year-old Rohan Agrawal is making a name for himself in robotics and computer programming circles across the nation. Over the past few months, he worked as an intern for OLogic, a robotics company based in Sunnyvale, California, that builds robotics machines for companies like Disney and Google. OLogic CEO Ted Larson was skeptical of Agrawal’s talents at first, but was won over within days of hiring him.
Larson gave Agrawal a box full of tools and parts to tinker with, just to see what the kid could do. Larson says that if he gave that same box to a graduate or Ph.D. student, they would come back within a couple of weeks with something workable. Agrawal came back the very next day with a functioning robot, and by the end of the week, had developed it into an even more complex one that could go around from cubicle to cubicle delivering snacks to workers.
So how does such a young kid become a bona fide robotics genius? Agrawal says he’s self-taught, having developed a keen interest in computers and technology at a very young age. Since both of his parents are also engineers, they encouraged him to pursue his interests in this field and helped him along the way.
“Someone gave me a box of K’Nex for my [fourth] birthday,” says Agrawal, which spurred his interest in the tech field. At just five years old, he was introduced to the HTML software language, and the search engine Google; in practically no time, he had already created his first website. At age seven, Agrawal says he moved away from the software side of things to focus on hardware, and the actual building of robots.
At age 10, he joined the robotics group called Hacker Dojo. It was during his time at Hacker Dojo that Agrawal’s father found out about OLogic, and inquired about a possible internship for his son, which the company agreed to.
Now, at age 12, it seems he’s mastered both hardware and software, and is ready to take on seasoned Silicon Valley veterans. OLogic’s vice-president, Mike Thompson, worked the most with Agrawal during his internship with the company, and said that he’s never seen a kid with such incredible knowledge of robotics.
Thompson said hiring Agrawal was “kind of an experiment on our part,” but it eventually became “[a] challenge for us [to keep] one to two steps ahead of him and [keep] him busy.”
It will be quite some time before Agrawal joins the workforce, but he already knows he wants to pursue robotics and possibly computer science professionally. Agrawal also says that his dream project at the moment is to build a robot that can cook, so that it can make snacks for him.
To contact the author, email to deepakchitnis@americanbazaaronline.com