Rohan Agrawal builds robots — and he's not even a teenager yet. While most kids his age likely spent their summer playing video games or on the monkey bars, the 12-year-old wunderkind tinkered away at an internship making robots from scratch.
The pre-teen spent the last few months at OLogic, a Sunnyvale, Calif., company known for designing robots for Google and Disney. While there, Agrawal built a device capable of autonomously delivering bags of potato chips throughout the office.
See also: 9 Robotic Inventions That Are Already Among Us
"I'm self taught," says Agrawal, who started programming at age 4, and tells Mashable his first language was HTML. "My mom showed me Google once and I was really fascinated by it. I asked her how it works and she told me you use this thing called HTML."
He started studying coding, and by age 5 built his first basic website. Soon thereafter, a trip to Cuptertino's electronic flea market sparked his interest in hardware.
His parents, both engineers, bought him a digital circuit book and a kit, and he started tinkering. He says he built all of the examples in the book, hoping not to blow anything up. But he was only 6 years old at this point, and there were some accidents. Luckily, no one got hurt.
The young Agrawal refined his skills by attending a robotics club. At age 9 he got a ham radio (a small, experimental communication device) license for his birthday. This led him to learn about Arduino boards, the programmable mini computer controllers he would use to create basic robots. Soon he was building devices like a small robot capable of finding an object on a table, and pushing it to a shoe box goal at the end of the table. Simple creations, but light years ahead of metal erector sets or Legos.
At the age of 10 he joined the creative group Hacker Dojo, where he worked with a team whose goal was to build robots for under $500; a challenge, considering how expensive parts and hardware can be.

Sensing his son needed more stimulus, Agrawal's father reached out to OLogic through the Hacker Dojo, and asked if young Rohan could attend a summer internship. The company accepted.
While at OLogic, Agrawal built a variation of the roomba, the Apple-made autonomous navigation device used for sweeping and vacuuming. Agrawal's machine is a play on that — but instead of cleaning room-to-room, it goes into offices and delivers snacks.
"That's how I got the idea for the autonomous chip robots," he says. "All you have to do is type in a command and it runs a program so it will automatically drive around and randomly select an audience. I'm working on getting it to see if there's anybody in the room. If there isn't, it will leave and won't wait."
The machine works through an existing program called SLAM, which stands for simultaneous location and mapping. It allows sensors on the device to create maps that see and avoid obstacles.
OLogic's vice president of engineering, Mike Thompson, who worked one-on-one with Agrawal, said having such a young intern was "kind of an experiment on our part." But the young developer "absolutely stunned us with what he knew."
"He has an insatiable curiosity about everything robotics," Thompson says. "The challenge for us was keeping one to two steps ahead of him and keeping him busy."
OLogic couldn't pay him because of his age, and instead bought him lunch everyday. Thompson says he would hire Agrawal if given the chance. Here's a video of Agrawal in action at OLogic:

With the internship over, Agrawal is back at work in his mini-studio, a converted garage with a soldering iron and scattered electronics.

The rest of the time he's at the hacker dojo, where he mentors other kids, most of whom are older .

Agrawal, who says he's never seen the classic robot apocalypse films Terminator or Blade Runner, says he's looking forward to coming innovations, especially Google's driverless cars. He says he wants a robot "that can cook so he can make snacks." A robot like that would cost at least $100,000, he says, and the machine "would need highly dexterous arms with super precision."
Still years from college, he says he wants to pursue robotics professionally — or computer programming.
Agrawal's advice to other young, creative minds? "If you're interested in something, don't be scared to get into it."
Image: Vivek Agrawal