Hiranya Agarwal

How I got here.

From school robotics in Adelaide to mechanical engineering at UNSW, student space projects and a live software platform.

  1. Joined VEX Robotics at Pedare Christian College.

    Team 41103A, competing as NextGen. The first lesson of competition robotics arrives quickly: a robot that works on the bench is not the same thing as a robot that works on a field with another robot pushing it.

  2. Helped run the Australian National VEX Championship.

    Event organisation alongside the build. Good practice for any job where you are both the engineer and the person who gets the call when something breaks.

  3. The flywheel robot, and the first of two national titles in a row.

    A flywheel and gear train on the upper deck, drive motors underneath, and a home practice field where most of the driving hours happened rather than at events.

    The Spin Up season robot lit with red and blue light, showing the flywheel, the gear train and the NextGen name plate.
    Flywheel deck
    An earlier robot beside the home practice field, with pneumatic cylinders visible and scoring discs stacked on the floor.
    Home field

  4. Captain. National champions again. Then Dallas.

    The last robot and the best one. Back to back Australian titles, the only South Australian team to qualify for the VEX World Championship, and the Sportsmanship Award in the high school engineering division among roughly 820 teams from more than 70 countries. ABC Radio Adelaide and Glam Adelaide covered it.

    Team members in the pit area at the VEX World Championship in Dallas, beside the 41103A pit banner among hundreds of other team stands.
    Pit floor, DallasEvery one of 820 teams within walking distance of your bench.

  5. Australian Defence Force Future Innovators Award.

    Awarded in my final year of school. Then a move interstate.

  6. UNSW, BlueSat, and a lab of our own.

    Started mechanical engineering at UNSW. Led the antenna pointing mounts for BlueSat's CubeSat ground station and handed the package on at the end of the year. Co-founded Project Umbrella Labs and started building the ADA²M drone in it.

  7. Volunteered at the International Astronautical Congress.

    The 76th IAC came to Sydney and I worked it as a volunteer with Young Space Explorers NSW, a NSW Department of Education program. Part of that was a CubeSat assembly and weather balloon workshop with Robinson Aerospace Systems, which meant days of putting satellite structures together with school students, in the same building as the people who fly the real thing.

    Hiranya in a BlueSat jacket fastening a screw into a black 1U CubeSat structure with a red screwdriver, circuit boards visible inside.
    CubeSat assembly
    Hiranya with two workshop leads beside the CubeSat Assembly and Weather Balloon banner from Young Space Explorers and Robinson Aerospace Systems.
    The workshop

  8. CentralPass goes live. Back in a VEX pit, on the other side of the table.

    Co-founded CentralPass, wrote the platform over several months, and put its first venue into production at Caffe Primo Firle. Started coaching VEX IQ teams at Barker College, on the other side of the pit table this time.