B'lore students win robotics contest

Robots made by two teams from Indian Institute of Science and  PES Institute of Technology, both from Bangalore,  won in e-Yantra, a national robotics competion for undergraduate engineering students across all disciplines.

The winning teams win the coveted summer internship at IIT Mumbai along with cash prize.
Pranav Santosh Mundada of Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore won the contest on the theme ‘Robot - Line of followers’ and the team comprising Manoj Babu S, Syed Mohammad Fazal, Prithvi Srinivasan and Suraj Srinivas won it under the ‘Robot Pick and Placer’ theme.

The day-long event, held recently, saw the 20 finalist teams including teams from Allahabad, Bangalore, Coimbatore, Salem, Jalgaon and Shimoga. This nine-month long competition, kick-started with over 6000 registrations coming in from all over the country. Of these 6000, 500 students made it to the shortlisted 131 teams who competed to solve one of the four themes.

These themes - pothole filler; room cleaner; pick and placer; and line follower - are scaled down problems from everyday life. Of the shortlisted 500 students, 25% were female. In general the girls have fared well and 11 girls featured among the finalists. The ‘open-source’ e-Yantra initiative by IIT Bombay aims to create the next generation of Indian embedded systems engineers with a practical outlook to help provide solutions to some of our day-to-day problems.