ROBOTICS
Journey of a kid who loved playing with LEGO to writing weird codes...
IITK Motorsports
My experience as a Junior Team Member 😌
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?
The team has a lot of subsystems: Chassis, Suspensions and steering, Brakes and Wheels, Electronics..etc. I was a part of the Software Subsytem. The roles of my Subsytem were: Data acquisition and F1tenth. Our team has a long term goal of participating in the Autonmous Vehicle category. The short term goal towards this was-F1tenth.
F1tenth
It is an automous car racing competition but the car is 1/10 the size of an actual car. Here are some of the simulations I ran:Wall following with PID control
Automatic emergency braking
Follow the gap for Obstacle avoidance
Scan matching for Localiztion.Vanilla P-L ICP. reference
Robocup Junior 2016 Leipzig
How it all started...
I was in Bangalore for 6 years, as a student of Baldwin Girls' High School. When I was in the 6th grade our school had formed a collaboration with LSCL, a company that taught robotics in various schools. They introduced the term "STEM" and used LEGO WEDO kits and NXT kits in classes. We would have 2 hours of class per week. For some reason my classmates did not like those classes so much. Something I was not able to understand. Why would you hate 2 hours of building blocks, that moved. It definitely is much much better than an hour of history.