RAIPUR: A four-wheeled wooden box that will otherwise be dismissed for a piece of junk lying on the campus of National Institute of Technology (NIT) made of wires and scrape has been selected as a ‘robo’ contestant in Asia’s largest science and technology festival at the Mumbai IIT called the Techfest, 2013.
Not just an ordinary experiment of some engineering under-graduates, the robo nicknamed ‘T-rex’ has an interesting story. It was just a year ago that Chandan Kumar Jha, a bio-medical student at NIT realised that apart from his subject, it was electronics also that he was interested in. The urge was so strong that Chandan with a team of five experimented, discarded and reinvented a combat robot which made its way to the robo-war to be held against 71 contestants on January 3, 2013 where these NITians would be participating with their ‘bot’.
Talking to TOI, Chandan, a 2nd year student, said that he started this project by himself and was later teamed with five students. “Our ‘bot’ has the most extra-ordinary features of being a wireless robot, which got us selected against 300 highly competitive contestants. The initially designed robot looked ugly with wires all around,” he said. Explaining further, Chandan said that the robowar is where two robots confront a fight and the technologically stronger one wins. “Not only this, even the remote which is being designed, would be wireless with a touch-screen operation! This is going to be the uniqueness of our project,” Mohana Roy Choudhury, a team-member chipped in.
Financial help for these tech-buffs was possible only after proving their mettle. The trial and error on the bot took a lot of exhaustive hours. After Rs 25,000 that they had as savings and a lot of hardwork, the robot is almost ready. “Now, we would again dismantle it, fix every part properly for the fight and make it look better,” Ashutosh, another team member said. With ‘better’ they mean, to make it look tougher and dangerous. “And to accomplish the remaining work, NIT has sanctioned an amount of Rs 10,000 to the students. That has been a real help at this hour,” Chandan said.
The nearly 60 kg T-rex being carried by the team, across the campus for experiments attracts everybody’s attention. The team members include Akanksha Singh, Ashutosh Bandhopadhyay, Mohana who are students of Bio-medical while N Laxman Kumar and Sumit Dhalia are pursuing Electronics and Tele-communication.
“Facing about 50,000 participants, if we get through the contest, it would get us Rs 1 lakh as the winning prize amount,” they said.
“By the end of my course, I vow to make the T-rex competent enough to be used for defence purposes. Lots of work is to be done on it by adding censors to sense the danger zones etc. It will become more dangerous,” said a confident Chandan.
Asked about the journey with the robot, Chandan said that initially it was a loner’s dream. Slowly when people started joining him, he aimed for the techfest. In two months time, amidst the examinations and classes, they struggled with the ‘bot’ even if they got 10 minutes of spare time. “We arranged the raw materials from anything and everything cheaply available in the surrounding. They include spare auto-parts, wires, scrap from kabaadis, screws. We also had to buy few essential equipments, which we ordered online,” Chandan said.
Source: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com
