Manipal Institute of Technology’s Project MANA-- a robot named ‘Solo’-- clinched the top place at the Annual Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (IGVC) held at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, USA.
Competing against 35 teams from across the globe including IIT-Madras, IIT-Kharagpur, DTU and others (from India), Solo emerged the best. The team got a cash prize of US$ 3,800.
“A creditable performance indeed, considering that this was only their second participation in the competition,” said MIT Director Dr Srikanth Rao.
He added: “The students have done well for themselves and have brought laurels to the country and Manipal Academy of Higher Education. With this experience, they will continue to do well in future as well”.
Project MANAS improved their overall performance considerably since last time. They had finished ninth overall earlier. Apart from bagging the Grand Prize (overall), the team also bagged the first prize in ‘interoperability profile challenge’, second in ‘design challenge’ and sixth in ‘cyber-security’.
The team was led by Siddhartha Venkatraman and Shrijit Singh. The other members were: Arya Karani, Ansel Dias, Rakshit Jain, Shivesh Khaitan, Dheeraj Mohan,
Sarathkrishnan Ramesh, Anirudh Kashyap, Nishan De’Almadia, Gokul P and Tanaya Mandke.
The advisor was Ashalatha Nayak, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, MIT.