Thursday 24 January 2013

IIT-B Techfest: City team wins RoboWars in record time

“Blood, sweat, destruction and glory,” this is how IIT Bombay’s Techfest web page describe its RoboWars event. This year the glory at RoboWars event belonged to three final year mechanical engineering students from Pune who won the competition in a record time of ‘within 3 seconds’.

Techfest held between January 3 and 5 is an annual technical festival held at IIT Mumbai every year where students from all over the world participate in various events. As many as 500 teams had registered online for the event out of which 59 teams were selected for the competition. There were six rounds in the competition, each a knock out round of 3 minutes, where two robots fought it out in the arena.

Rust In Peace (RIP), a 60 kg robot designed by Pushkin Sonuskar, Rohit Patel and Habeel Bakshi, final year mechanical engineering students of Padmabhooshan Vasantdada Patil Institute of Technology won the event.

“In the finals we were fighting a team from Sabu Siddiqui college in Mumbai. The moment the fight started, our RIP hit Dr Golu (Sabu Siddiqui’s robot) and flipped it out. Dr Golu couldn’t get back on its wheels and we won within three seconds from the start of the bout. This is a record winning time in the history of IIT tech fest,” said Rohit Patel.

Rohit and team won Rs 30,000 at the event.

The participants had to ‘design and construct a remote controlled robot capable of fighting a one on one tournament’. The maximum permissible weight of the robot is 60kg and it is required to destroy its opponent without damaging itself to win the match.

This is not the first time the team has won a major event. They also won the RoboWars at VJTI, Mumbai, held early this month.

“The preparation for the event started in July itself. Rs 50,000 was given by the college management thanks to professor SM Patil and rest we took out from our pocket. The weapon on our robot was a 14 kg drum that completes 5,000 revolutions per minute. The energy stored in it is 5,000 joules which is equivalent to two AK-47 bullets hitting you,” Patel said. “With the prize money, we want to make it more sophisticated and wireless so that we can participate in Robo games in California,” he added.

“We are very proud of our students. They will be felicitated by the college. Plus after seeing their enthusiasm, many students have shown interest and we are in talks with various companies to make a Robo center in the campus so that creativity of the students is utilised in a good way,” said SD Shirbahadurkar, Principal, PVPIT.

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