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- IKR Gravity
- Radio Controls Club
- Team Robocon
- Team Sally Robotics
- TRAC
- IKR Electric
- Team Anant
- Team BITS, Shell Eco
IKR Gravity
Inspired Karters Gravity (IKR Gravity), known as Inspired Karters Baja until last year, is currently working on a Human Powered Vehicle for manned explorations on the Moon and on Mars. The English Press Club interviewed Aditya Patel, the team coordinator of IKR Gravity, to understand the work they have done in the past year.
By early 2020, IKR Gravity had prepared a timeline to complete their work on the Human Powered Vehicle. The team sanctioned funds from the institute to implement their one-of-a-kind Leaning Suspension System in their rover. However, their progress was halted with the sudden closure of campus in March 2020. When it became clear that the campus would not reopen for the semester, the team decided to focus on the design of the rover instead of its construction.
The freshers were divided into groups of two to three members each. Each group was assigned a senior mentor who guided their learning over the summer. The team held meetings once a week to make sure everyone was making sufficient progress.
During the lockdown, IKR Gravity submitted its proposal at NASA’s Human Exploration Rover Challenge (HERC) and was among the 28 teams selected from over hundreds of international teams. HERC has conducted several online modules so far where the team had to submit a proposal and a design review report. On January 18, IKR Gravity delivered a presentation in front of a NASA panel.
Despite the closure of campus and COVID restrictions all around, IKR Gravity is happy with the work they have managed to do so far and are working to have an even more productive 2021. They are currently gearing up for their Mission Readiness Review with HERC in March.
Radio Controls Club
The Radio Controls Club (RC Club) is a team of RC aviation enthusiasts who primarily build fixed-wing aircraft. The team mostly focuses on fixed-wing aircraft ranging in size from those that can fit on the palm of your hand to ones almost as big as the average person. Despite their primary field being manual and autonomous fixed-wing aircraft, the team also builds quadcopter and hexacopter drones. The English Press Club interviewed Effy John, Joint-Captain of The Radio Controls Club on the progress they have made over the past year.
The RC Club, like other tech teams, has faced many issues due to the COVID-19 lockdown. Building aircraft requires an appreciable level of hands-on work with hardware and a lot of teamwork. The pandemic has only made it more difficult for the team to work as they usually would. Since individual members haven’t been able to meet up and do physical work due to lockdowns, the team focused on simulating and prototyping aircraft using software. Members have been spending time honing their knowledge of concepts and principles that will be advantageous to know for more complex applications.
The pandemic caused a slew of tech events to be cancelled. However, they did participate in Flipkart’s engineering campus challenge, GRiD, which was conducted online. The RC Club was among the 46 teams to make it to the semi-finals in their category.
The team made proposals for other competitions but have decided to focus primarily on AUVSI SUAS. It is an international competition where participants have to create an autonomous aircraft from scratch which can complete a set of tasks. To prepare for this competition, the RC Club is focusing on further role specialisation within the team. The team plans to physically produce the prototype they intend to submit at this competition as soon as campus reopens.
Team Robocon
Team Robocon consists of tech enthusiasts who build robots. They participate in competitions such as the ABU Robocon, IIT Bombay’s Techfest, e-Yantra, and Flipkart’s GRiD 2.0. They also conduct workshops for robotics and other related fields from time to time.
In the past, they have undertaken projects like building a micromouse (a maze-solving robot), an autonomous biped, a badminton-playing robot, a manual drone, and a semi-autonomous drone. Most of these were built for and entered into competitions. Last year, they sent three teams to participate in Flipkart’s GRiD 2.0, all of which reached the semi-finals in their respective categories.
Team Robocon is working on two long-term projects at the moment. The first is a level-4 autonomous quadcopter—one that will navigate through a GPS-denied environment, planning its path and avoiding obstacles, when given a starting and ending position. There are also long term plans of achieving level-5 autonomy—where the robot’s onboard AI makes all the path planning decisions by itself. The second project is an autonomous quadruped—a four-legged robot that can navigate uneven terrains, climb stairs, and right itself when disturbed. A prevalent example of such a robot is Spot from Boston Dynamics—the team plans to build an improved, indigenous, and more cost-effective version of such a quadruped. The team expects both these robots to be used in defence, medical, and space research centres.
The online semester has come as a challenge to them, but like other teams, Robocon has tried its best to adjust. They are building and testing their code and designs over simulation software like Gazebo. On the hardware front, they are 3D printing robot designs from home—the team recently bought a 3D printer to this end. Recruitments and other management procedures are also being done remotely.
Due to the pandemic, most competitions are now being conducted virtually. The team attended a simulation-based event for the International Micromouse Challenge and participated in Flipkart’s GRiD 2.0 and e-Yantra virtually. Plans for an online seminar are in the pipeline and will be announced soon.
Team Sally Robotics
Sally Robotics is an autonomous driving technical team at the Centre for Robotics & Intelligent Systems (CRIS). They are a group of researchers who use artificial intelligence to create an autonomous navigation system in settings as complex and chaotic as Indian roads. The team believes that their research contributions in this domain will help solve many fundamental challenges faced by Self Driving Cars (SDC) around the world. The EPC spoke to the team to learn about their goals and how they have worked over the past semester.
Sally Robotics undertakes their research through four broad subsystems: Computer Vision, Simultaneous Localisation And Mapping (SLAM), Navigation, and Mechanical Design, which jointly develop robust solutions. They have been developing deep learning approaches to solve prominent problems like Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation, Instance Segmentation, and Image Dehazing and Denoising, for proper scene perception. Earlier this year, the team published a paper at the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems at NTU, Singapore examining the applicability of Computer Vision networks for unstructured Indian environments.
The pandemic has proven to be a big hurdle for the team since their subsystems greatly rely on collaborative storage devices and hardware accelerators that cannot be accessed remotely. To cope with this, they utilised cloud-based GPU and storage solutions. Due to lack of access to physical infrastructure, they developed software-based algorithms and tested them in simulation environments. A major area of focus was the improvement of existing scene perception techniques and developing novel algorithms for various driving applications. Since mechanical builds require exact measurements and classical approaches, models are being constructed on software like MATLAB and Fusion 360 instead.
Once campus reopens, the team plans to deploy the recently developed software on a bot, to validate its applicability. Apart from further enhancing this software to apply it to their car, they will also work on systems that assist in navigation.
TRAC
Apart from the eponymous radio astronomy, members of The Radio Astronomy Club (TRAC) are also interested in computational astronomy, and the mapping of radio waves and gravitational waves. The club encourages its members to explore diverse fields under the umbrella of astronomy. They use data from two sources: the antennae they have set up on campus, and public sources on the internet.
In a conversation with the English Press Club, Nikita Saxena, the coordinator, said that with the campus abruptly closing down, it took them some time to adjust to working remotely. A major issue with them not being on campus is difficulty in accessing data from the SWAN project—a flagship research opportunity set up by the Raman Research Institute. She explained that on the campus network, they can log in to their portal directly and gain access to the data. However, now they have to ask the Raman Research Institute to download the data for them and then send it over, which affects efficiency.
Over the summer of 2020, they started working in computational studies and machine learning. Using publicly available data, they worked on platforms such as Google Collab—an online coding editor that allows users to perform extensive computations without the need for expensive hardware and RAM.
Nikita said that while there were no major competitions that the club participated in, they did take part in a few workshops organised by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory—one of the biggest observatories in the world. If the campus reopens, a major priority of the club would be to get the SWAN project back on track. They also plan to conduct a Radio Frequency Interference Survey to ascertain the optimum location for an antenna that they plan to set up. However, if campus does not reopen soon, they intend to continue working on machine learning projects and also design an antenna that can identify meteoroids in different frequencies.
IKR Electric
Inspired Karters – Electric, formerly known as Inspired Karters – Formula Student, is a tech team that builds electric cars. They manufacture a new car every year to participate in Formula Student races such as Formula Bharat. They are one of the few clubs on campus to attract big names in the industry such as IndianOil and Autodesk as sponsors for their projects. Building a car while juggling academics and other commitments requires a lot of passion and dedication from the team members, and these are the qualities that the club looks for in new recruits. The English Press Club reached out to Shikar Vohra of IKR – Electric, to understand how the team is adapting to working remotely due to the COVID-19 induced lockdown.
Shikar said that since it was initially difficult to collaborate remotely, the club set dates on which members involved in different subsystems would meet and review the work done. The deadlines for the allotted tasks were not very tight, allowing people to finish their work as and when convenient. Moreover, as it was not possible for them to physically build a car, their workload was somewhat lighter this year.
The team participated in two notable competitions last year. The first was the Formula Student Electric Vehicle Concept Challenge, usually held in Bangalore in the month of July, but held virtually for the first time. The technical part of the competition mainly focused on the presentation of their electric powertrain, while the non-technical side revolved around proving the team’s ability to manage the workflows involved in building the car under the unique circumstances. They finished first in Team Management and in the Procurement Report, and fourth in Design. The team had been the runners-up for the past two years and finally bagged the top spot last year. They also participated in the Formula Bharat competition in December which was also held online. It involved business presentations as well as electrical and mechanical performance tests. The team placed fifteenth.
Regarding their plans for the next year, Shikar said that they hope to return to campus soon and complete work on their car, something they expect will take around two months. If campus does not reopen, they intend to work towards improving the performance of the car on paper without budgetary restrictions. However, without a real car to derive data from, they find their efforts somewhat constrained.
Team Anant
Founded in 2013, Team Anant has been relentlessly working to build BITS Pilani’s first-ever indigenous nanosatellite. The EPC spoke to its coordinator, George Savio, to find out how they have weathered the storm of the past year.
The team’s primary goal is to construct a 3U nanosatellite with a hyperspectral camera as payload. With its current focus on the 3U imaging CubeSat, the team is still in the design phase. They have been working in collaboration with the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) to achieve their goals. Recently, ISRO sent out a notice that sought proposals for experimental payloads for incorporation in the fourth stage of the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV). Anant submitted two proposals and ISRO, satisfied with one, has asked for its resubmission following some changes.
Unlike many other teams that have suffered a significant setback due to lack of equipment, Anant has sailed through in a comparatively smooth manner. The team is continuously working, with at least two different subsystems having a meeting on any given day. However, due to the inaccessibility of processors which are present on campus, work on some subsystems, such as the On-Board Computer, has taken a hit. Additionally, plans to test out coarse sun sensors at the Central Electronics Engineering Research Institute (CEERI) have been delayed. George also noted that Anant’s overall productivity has been affected, as members were unable to collaborate and work together in person.
The team is set to continue with the current mode of operation. They hope to make good progress this semester, hoping that it is enough for the Institute to allow some members to return to campus and continue work on the project.
Team BITS, Shell Eco
Team BITS, Shell Eco was founded in 2012 and represents BITS Pilani at the Shell Eco-Marathon— a worldwide energy efficiency competition sponsored by Royal Dutch Shell. The team initially participated in the Prototype Gasoline category. For the past few years, however, the team has switched to competing in the Ethanol Urban Concept.
The team is currently developing two projects simultaneously—Arcadian, a 100% ethanol-powered Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicle, and Vidyut—a prototype Electric Vehicle. The pandemic caused some initial hurdles in the team’s functioning, but they eventually settled with a virtual workflow. Online meetings, cloud collaboration, and communication between every subsystem have emerged as the pillars of their high research output, efficiency, and smooth functioning.
During the lockdown, the team participated in challenges organised by Shell—Pitch the Future, the Autonomous Programming Challenge, Bonus Challenges, and the Virtual Technical Inspection. The team is extremely happy with their performance and is currently positioned 4th on the Global leaderboard of Shell Eco-Marathon 2021. In a mini-challenge of the first-ever virtual competition of Shell Eco-Marathon held in collaboration with Microsoft, the team ranked amongst the top five teams in the Asia and Middle East region.
The previous semester turned out to be a setback in terms of pace and efficiency compared to an offline semester. Many processes, such as prototype construction, came to a halt since the manufacturing facilities on campus were inaccessible. To avoid a complete standstill, team members contacted vendors across the country and got quotations for purchasing, manufacturing and fabricating various parts. The team plans to rent a workshop in Delhi and put together a car for the upcoming Virtual Inspection Competition, scheduled for March 2021.