Sab Chill hain

In my fourth semester, I discovered, by chance, that one of my seniors in the Motorsports Team was working on a rover with the Robotics Club. He and his friends at the Robotics Club had gone for Robofest 3.0 at Gujarat previously with a rover and won a 2 lakh cash prize for building a physical prototype of a rover.

They were now looking to build a better version of the rover, one with a manufactured metal chassis, onboard computing, a full software stack and a robotic arm. There were a few club members involved in it, both second and third years. They wanted to participate in the ISRO Rover Challenge happening in June. There were 2 seniors and 7 juniors on the team. On requesting, the club coordinators were nice enough to let me in on the team.

So, why is the title- A failed endeavour?

I spent my Winter of 2023 as an intern at the MRL lab. It is by far the coolest lab I have seen in IITK. They have developed their own Quadruped, and are an IITK incubated Startup - XTerra. The PHDs there were nice enough to let me work there even though my knowledge with hardware and electronics was rather poor. I was working on integrating a pressure sensor in the foot of the Quadruped. I had chosen a sensor, tested it with a microcontroller and designed and 3D printed an alternate foot design to integrate the same in the robot dog. While my contribution to the lab was negligible compared to other lab members, I enjoyed attending full team weekly presentations where everyone talked about their research work. It was impressive how they planned and collaborated on each others work. Apart from the banter, there was also constructive feedback provided. This was the first time I was exposed to real robotics. I am grateful that they let me observe the inner workings of their team.

Since I am not sure if the readers are from my college or not, I should set a background. We have a few institute-recognized student teams that take part in various competitions. IITKMS team is Formula Student Team, for the past 10+ years members have been building and designing combustion vehicles. After the Lock-down period, the team switched to EV category. IITKMS won the virtual round of Formula Bharat 2023 marking the start of a new era [Virtual implies- Design submissions]. The year 2023 was devoted to procurement and manufacturing of our institute's first EV- Vidyut.

What was my role?

F1tenth

Wall following with PID control

Automatic emergency braking

Follow the gap for Obstacle avoidance

Scan matching for Localiztion.Vanilla P-L ICP. reference