Battle bots slug it out at Techfest

Mahafreed Irani | TNN

On the last day of IIT’s Techfest, robots battled it out in the grand finales of various contests: Robowars, mini F1 and a maze-solving game.

The fiercest looking automatons were undoubtedly the battle bots of Robowars. The arena saw metal clash with metal as robots of different shapes and sizes, equipped with choppers, blades, hammers and flippers, clashed. The contest’s winners, a team from Government Engineering College, Aurangabad, designed their robot for two years. “We won because of our sleek design. The flipper helped us fling the opponent, turning it upside down,” said Hemant Chambhare, who named the robot One-Shot Killer. “We spent about Rs 70,000 to build it.”

Jayvis Gonsalves won ‘the most innovative robot’ prize for his Bluetooth-controlled creation. “My robot, Blitzkrieg, is wireless. I didn’t have to worry about any wires getting entangled,” Gonsalves, a student of Dikshit Junior College, Vile Parle, said.

While the robots were locked in battle, nearby, remote-controlled mini cars were racing on an off-road dirt track full of obstacles. Two participants from Chennai, Sharadh Uday and Riten Satra, built their car in just four days. “It is powered by an internal combustion engine and made of aluminium,” said Uday.
One of the attractions at Techfest, that drew large numbers of Mumbaikars, and not just students, was a couple of vehicles designed by students of Adelaide University. Called Micycle and Diwheel, their makers called them environment friendly modes of transport. While Micycle is a stylish self-balancing electric unicycle (a cycle with one wheel), Diwheel, as the name suggests, has two giant wheels, with the rider’s seat in between. It has a joystick for navigating and uses regenerative braking to recoup some of the energy lost during the process of stopping. In another hall, Hakon Wium Lie, the chief technical officer of Opera (the browser) and inventor of the language CSS, used to design websites, spoke to a packed audience about his days at CERN, the laboratory that is at present engaged in the search of the Higgs boson, and how the web was created there. Emphasizing the importance of open, or free, data, he said: “In the early days, we Norwegians would have to pay the government to get access to the laws of the country. So one day, we uploaded all the laws on the CERN server, making it freely available to all.”

In the convocation hall, autonomous robots were trying to figure out a complex maze. This made the International Robotics Challenge perhaps the most complex contest of them all. Participants watched as the robots found their way in the maze, transporting blocks. The winners were a group of engineering students from Sri Lanka. “We love robotics and were kicked about the contest as soon as we got the invite,” said Nipuna Illangarathne of the group.

EXTREME MACHINES: Electric vehicles Micycle (bottom left) and Diwheel (bottom right). The Sri Lankan team (above left) that won the International Robotics Challenge. Cars (above right) at the starting point of the mini F1 racing contest

IIT-B students set up society to study Mars

Srinivas Laxman TNN

Mumbai: A group of IIT Bombay students have embarked on a different type of stellar mission—to “launch” Indian students and others to Mars. Towards this end, they have formed The Mars Society, dedicated to the study of the red planet.

This comes at a time when the Indian space community has proposed 10 experiments related mainly to the Martian atmosphere during an Indian mission to Mars. This muchawaited expedition is now awaiting the formal ‘go’ from Isro, the space commission and the Union cabinet.

Dhruv Joshi, a final-year chemistry student at IIT-B who initiated the move to set up the society, said that when he was in Switzerland last year, he saw a presentation about the local chapter of The Mars Society. “I then decided to form a similar society in India as well,” he told TOI.

As a first step, a conference will be held at IIT-B about Mars. “Whomever I have spoken to about this society at IIT seems extremely excited and thrilled, especially the freshers,” Joshi added.

“The primary aim of the society is to encourage human exploration and colonization of Mars. We hope to recruit university students from technical and scientific disciplines, making use of their passion and creativity to develop a strong team of pioneers,” he said.

Jhonny Santosh Jha, a key player in IIT-B’s Pratham satellite project, explained that the India chapter of the society is now in the process of getting affiliated to the international chapter. “We just have a few members now, but are expanding,” he said, adding that the society will be organizing several Mars-related programmes in the days to come.

Many scientists at Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) in Ahmedabad, an affiliate of Isro, are of the view that an Indian mission to Mars should be accorded precedence over the second lunar mission as India has already launched a successful mission to the moon.