We are Michael Mora, Sergio Paez, Valeria Chica, and Lexi Kronowitz. This is our second year competing together as a team in First Lego League Robotics Competitions. We are also all black belts in taekwondo and compete together on an elite competition team ---- yes, we spend a great deal of time together!  We had a great year last year and went to the FIRST LEGO LEAGUE International Open Championship in the UK, where we won an award for robot design. 

 

      This year we won Grand Champion Award and Highest Robot Run at our qualifier. At Regionals, we earned a bid to compete with 70 other teams from around the world at the 2018 First Lego League Invitational Open Central Europe in Debrecen, Hungary. We also were selected as our region's nomination for the Global Innovation Award for our project and made top 20 FINALIST. As part of this year's robotics competition, we had to identify a problem involving the storage, use, or transportation of water and come up with an innovative solution.  We had seen our teacher's pictures of schools in Cambodia and knew we wanted to find a way to provide safe drinking water to children in Siem Reap. We researched all the existing methods of water collection/extraction to find one that would work in Siem Reap. Fortunately, Siem Reap's climate is very similar to ours in Miami so it made it easy to test our designs.  We tried four different types of passive collectors and one using thermoelectric (Peltier module) cooling, but none generated sufficient water.  We have had great success however using a compressor driven dehumidifier that we modified with food grade hoses, additional air filters and a water filter system. Using solar power, we can extract more than 15 gallons of water from the air each day! 

 

      We have made a commitment to a school in Cambodia that we will deliver to them this summer a system that will be able to provide them clean with drinking water. We set ourselves a goal of producing 15 gallons of water per day from the air using solar energy. We have achieved that goal. If our system could be produced throughout the country, it would lessen the impact on the water table. This system was specifically designed for Siem Reap. We have a very similar climate so we were able to test our system. The parts that we need to build our system in-country can be procured more cheaply in neighboring Asian countries. While we were able to find systems that extracted water from air, they were designed to be run indoors on electricity and were very expensive. Our design sought to take parts that were available in-country for reasonable prices, that could be powered by solar energy, and would require little maintenance.