MIT team excels in rover challenge in US

Mars Rover Manipal (MRM), the student rover design team from Manipal Institute of Technology (MIT), blazed a glorious trail at the 13th edition of University Rover Challenge held in Utah, USA, recently.

The student rover made by the MAHE’s official team, powered by Mouser Electronics and Echjay Industries, was the winner among the Asian challengers and finished eight globally out of the 84 participating teams. It also won the Barainca award for the best science team in the competition.

For the fourth consecutive year, the MRM has been amongthe top 36 international teams and was one of the only 5 teams from India to make it to the final stage of University Rover Challenge ‘19 at the Mars Desert Research System along with IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, VIT Vellore and SRM.

University Rover Challenge (URC) is the world’s premier robotics competition for undergraduate students. The URC challenges interdisciplinary student teams to design and build the next generation Mars Rovers. These rovers are designed to be capable of traversing and performing tasks on Mars-simulated terrain, in goals of aiding human exploration on the red planet.

The competition requires participants to complete 4 missions—the science mission, the autonomous traversal mission, the extreme retrieval and delivery mission and the equipment servicing mission.

“It was a wonderful experience to lead a team in an international competition. It was great to see that the team’s hard work was rewarded. No words can express the feeling of representing the institute and the country,” said one of the team leader Safal Ajmera.

“The team has been remarkable at work since the beginning. We just wanted those who supported us, to be proud of everything we did,” the other leader V Sai Shyam added.

The team was led by Safal Ajmera and V Sai Shyam. Other members of the team are: Siril Teja Dukkipati, Ajay Rangan, Tushaar Neb, Nishesh Singh, Ayush Parashar, Akash Yadav, Anandmayi Bhongade, Somesh Paranjpe, Kshitij Patil, Neil Doshi, Mohammed Mohsin H, Ved Chitnis, Agniv Saikia, Gaurav K H, Tanmay Shukla, M Aditya Sharma, Aditya Kolpe, Laksh Pahuja, Anmol Kumar, Karthik Datta, Mohammad Abdul Sulaiman, Sai Raghu Teja Davuluri, Sheena Kapoor, Vedant Dhonagde, Atharv Mudur, Kavya Banerjee, Abhijit Alok, Rakshit Tewari, Rachit Shah, Shaun Meric Menezes, Bladen Martin, Harshit Sharma, Sayantika Paul, Akanksha Kaushal, and Akshat Tulsani.