Can you make a robot work?
Call 8585951111Garima Upadhyay Rawat
The Indian Institute of Bombay (IITB) has announced the launch of E-Yantra - a pan India challenge on robotics. Unlike run of the mill robot competitions, what sets this competition apart from others is its format.
So far, competitions and challenges have expected students to build their own robots. However, this competition goes a step ahead. Students will be given robots (developed in house at IITB) and would be encouraged to develop solutions to pre-set tasks using them. This approach will make robotics accessible to engineering students pursuing a variety of disciplines such as computer science, information technology, electrical, and electronics, and mechanical engineering.
Undergraduate engineering students are eligible to participate in the pan-India E-Yantra challenge (You can register here). Up to 120 teams with a maximum of 4 members each will be selected to participate in the first round of the competition. Selected teams will make it to the next level to compete at a National Robotics Competition. The winners will be decided after the final round at the IITB Techfest in January 2013.
IIT Bombay envisages the E-Yantra platform to harness the intellectual talent of young India to create utility based robotic applications for usage across a variety of applications such as: agriculture, manufacturing, defense, services industry etc. The overall mission is to grow a rich eco-system of ideas and applications that can propel India's growth curve and productivity through intelligent funnelling of robotics in daily living built upon an existing pool of knowledge developed by students working on such projects at engineering colleges in the area of embedded systems.
The Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) is sponsoring E-Yantra under the National Mission for ICT in Education (NMEICT) program. The initiative seeks to provide hands-on learning-infrastructure to engineering students who have limited access to labs and
Elaborating on Project E-Yantra, professor Kavi Arya, conceptualiser and overall coordinator (principal investigator) informs, "India is at an interesting evolutionary moment in the global stage. We need to harness the youthful talent to solving our country's problems through innovative applications in the field of robotics. For instance, why can't we create a "Jhaddo-Khatka" robot, which can be deployed across public and private spaces? An important part of this initiative is to inspire the youth to look beyond themselves and solve the problems of the nation by leveraging their innovative thinking."
Professor Krithi Ramamritham, co-coordinator of Project E-Yantra, IIT Bombay, believes, "This proposal presents an integrated approach for incorporating robotics into secondary and engineering education with the objective of further engaging students through an exciting application of math, computers, and science. Projects are substantial exercises where the basic concepts are used to synthesise a complex application using several concepts to create a useful robotic artifact."
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