IIT-Bombay robotics competition to find solutions to daily problems

MUMBAI: The Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai might get an automated solution to their problems of filling up potholes from the pan India robotics competition E-Yantra, launched by IIT-Bombay on Tuesday. 

One of the tasks that will be given to the participants could be to design a robot to fill potholes. What sets apart this competition from other robotics event is that participants will be asked to change or develop a program using a robot developed at IIT-B. "The aim of the competition is to attract young talent to create utility based robotic applications for usage across a variety of fields right from agriculture, defence, home to city maintenance and serviceindustries," said professor Kavi Arya from the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) department, who conceptualised the project along with professor Krithi Ramamritham. 

The MHRD sponsors E-Yantra under the National Mission for ICT in Education (NMEICT) programme. The initiative will provide hands-on learning and infrastructure to engineering students who have limited access to labs and mentors. The students will identify problems and solve them using a little robot developed by the IIT-B team over the last five years. All the participants will have to appear for a written test to check their basic knowledge on robotics. After short-listing the candidates, the institute plans to have around 120 teams across the country with up to four members each. Students who are selected then will undergo training and will then compete. These teams will be then given different themes, for example using a robot to fill potholes, or to pick up fruits, etc. 

The grand finale will be during IIT-B's Techfest 2013. Interested participants can register at to participate in the challenge. "Traditionally when students were given robotics project, they had to first build a robot, and then work on the project. Now they have a commodity robot and an existing open source code base to draw upon to model a sophisticated solution to a problem," said professor Arya. It will also bring students across disciplines like electrical engineering, CSE, IT, etc together, he added.