Designing the Next Generation of First Responders - Mihir Garimella

Mihir won the 13-14 Age Category Award and the Google Computer Science Award at the Google Science Fair for his work on Flybot. Flybot is a tiny quadrotor that can avoid moving obstacles (like falling ceilings in collapsing buildings) by mimicking the way fruit flies detect and respond to threats.

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Mihir Garimella

Mihir Garimella is a student at Fox Chapel Area High School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is passionate about using computer science and robotics to make a difference. His latest work draws inspiration from nature to create low-cost flying robots for search and rescue and emergency response.

Mihir won the 13-14 Age Category Award and the Google Computer Science Award at the Google Science Fair for his work on Flybot. Flybot is a tiny quadrotor that can avoid moving obstacles (like falling ceilings in collapsing buildings) by mimicking the way fruit flies detect and respond to threats. Currently, he is creating hardware and software for a low-cost flying robot platform that can autonomously explore a burning building, avoiding obstacles while using sensory information to quickly locate the source of the fire or a trapped victim.

Aside from his work with flying robots, Mihir has designed a robotic violin tuner, wrote an image-processing program to help doctors diagnose brain tumors and built a device to embed smells within movie clips. He has also created many tools to help students, including CiteIt, which has been used by hundreds of students to create accurate bibliographies, and Classroom, which is a mobile app that replaces traditional student planners handed out by schools.