IIT-M ready with this year’s talent

CHENNAI: From palm-sized electronic circuits that can control drones to a prototype Mars rover that can navigate rough terrains, over 40 projects designed by students were lined up for demonstration at the Centre For Innovation (CFI) at the IIT-M on Sunday. The projects were up for public display during ‘CFI Open House’ - an annual event showcasing the recent work and achievements of student innovators within their campus.

This year, open house displayed the work of three internationally acclaimed competition teams: Team Anveshak’s Mars Rover, Team Raftar’s Formula Race Car and Team Abhiyaan’s Autonomous vehicle.
The Mars Rover ‘Aurora’ qualified for the finals of the University Rover Challenge and was demonstrated at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah desert in America. The team comprising 30 students designed a prototype motor vehicle that propels itself on the surface of Mars. “We have to test the vehicle on an extremely tough terrain and collect soil samples to test for presence of life,” said Akshay Molawade, leader of Team Anveshak. “ The machine also has sensors to detect temperature, humidity and altitude.

While ‘Aurora’ was designed to navigate Mars, Team Raftar had designed a race car that came first among all non-European teams in Formula SAE Italy and Formula Electric Italy. “The vehicle was tested for both static and dynamic excellence in Italy. Static would mean good design and endurance. The vehicle has to race other vehicles from across the world,” said Aishwary Gupta, captain of Team Raftar.

While vehicles and robots were operating on one side, cost effective eco-friendly LEDs were used to demonstrate how a 2 metre wide billboard could be lit up by simply 100 LED bulbs. They exploited a simple biological phenomenon called persistence of vision (PoV), where the brain perceives a series of images flashed quickly as one video. Once the model is built fully, it will be the largest PoV device in the country, the students claimed.

The open house was a technical gala with professors, researchers and students from across the country exchanging knowledge. B. Ravindran, Faculty-in-Charge, CFI, IIT-Madras, said, “The Centre For Innovation serves as an introduction to the vibrant entrepreneurial eco-system in IIT-Madras and several successful start-ups have been incubated from projects started at CFI.”