The Indian Institute of Bombay (IIT-B) has announced the launch of ‘E-Yantra’ – a pan-India challenge on robotics.
What sets this initiative apart from others is its format. While other challenges expect students to build their own robots, E-Yantra presents them with a robot developed at IIT-Bombay, and encourages them to develop solutions to pre-set tasks using these robots. This makes robotics accessible to students registered in an engineering college as undergraduates across a variety of disciplines such as Computer Science, Information Technology, Electrical and Electronics, and Mechanical Engineering.
IIT-Bombay hopes that the E-Yantra platform can harness the intellectual talent of young India to create utility-based robotic applications across a variety of applications such as agriculture, manufacturing, defense, home, city maintenance and the services industries. The mission is to grow a rich eco-system of ideas and applications that can propel India’s growth curve and productivity.
The Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) sponsors E-Yantra under the National Mission for ICT in Education (NMEICT) programme. The ‘open-source’ E-Yantra initiative aims to create the next generation of embedded systems Indian engineers, with a practical outlook to help provide practical solutions to some of the big problems plaguing the country.
The challenge is open to all undergraduate students of engineering. Each group will program a given robotic platform to solve a given problem with the given resources within a 12-week duration. The experience will be taken to the next level through a National Robotics Competition, where students from all over India will participate in solving tasks.
This will climax with a final competition at the IIT-B Techfest in January, 2013.
Interested participants can register at www.e-yantra.org/register. There is a selection process following which, up to 120 teams (maximum of 4 members in each team) will be selected to participate in the competition and be put through the necessary training.
Log onto www.e-yantra.org for registrations and details of the online test.