12-Year-Old Whiz As Smart As Ph.Ds

[Loki]

Robotics CEO: 12-Year-Old Whiz As Smart As Ph.Ds

When Ted Larson, the CEO of a Silicon Valley robotics firm, hired Rohan Agrawal as his summer intern this year he was skeptical that Rowan could keep up with his team’s pace.

Rohan, after all, is 12 years old. And Larson, whose firm, OLogic, usually hires college or graduate students as interns, had never worked with someone so young. But Larson’s worries were quickly dispelled.

“We had a large box of robot parts that some of the guys at Google gave us,” Larson said of Rowan’s first day at Ologic last summer. The box also contained a few laptops. “The goal was to get Linux and ROS (the Robot Operating System) up and running.”

Larson said that he could have given that box of parts to a grad student and they may have come back to him with a functioning robot in a couple of weeks. Rohan came back the next day with an assembled robot.

“And I was like, ‘oh my god,’ what will I do with him for the summer?” Larson said. “This was Day 2.”

By the end of the internship, Larson was comparing Rohan’s robotics aptitude and knowledge to that of a PhD: “And anyone who has a problem with that clearly hasn’t met Rohan.”

After hearing about Rohan’s very successful internship, we travelled to Silicon Valley to find out how Rohan learned so much about robots by such a young age. Watch the video above to meet Rohan and some of his robots.

[Mason8]

This is great that this kid has such intelligence and knowledge of robotics and computer science.