The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Robots slug it out at IIT technology competition

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Oct 09, 2005

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Robots slug it out at IIT technology competition

Sudhish Kamath

Over 200 warriors registered and 110 robots finally showed up for the big fight Over 200 warriors registered and 110 finally showed up for fight A team from College of Engineering, Guindy, came up with a unique mechanism that facilitated them to use the infrared ports

SCI-FI COMES ALIVE: Warrior robots at the Sumo Wrestling competition at `Shaastra' saw the audience go crazy about technology. — Photo: K.V. Srinivasan

CHENNAI: Scene: Ancient India.

A huge crowd watches a cockfight. There are cheers and bets placed as the fighters have a go at each other.

Cut to: Modern India.

Nothing has changed. The fight still goes on but the fighters here — adorned with metal, wood, wheels and circuitry — are robots.

Over 200 warriors registered and 110 robots finally showed up for the big fight on Saturday.

The students activity centre was the Coliseum for the modern-day gladiators at the Sumo Wrestling competition, organised at IIT's tech fest `Shaastra.'

Marathon round

After a marathon elimination round that lasted almost an entire day, 48 bots were chosen for the second round of 24 matches. The rules were simple:

The robots spend three minutes inside a 120cm diameter ring.

Each bot gets one point for flipping the other on any side and one point for pushing the other bot out of the arena.

The match gets over when a bot scores five points, or at the end of three minutes, the bot with more points gets adjudged as the winner of the match.

The enthusiasm was infectious. The students from Sardar Vallabhai National Institute of Technology had 20 bots readied up for the contest.

A team from College of Engineering, Guindy, came up with a unique mechanism that facilitated them to use the infrared ports from Nokia mobile phones as the remote control for their robot `Helios.' `Helios,' got through to the final round.

Bots in limelight

The other bot to hog a lot of attention was `Alligator,' from the Sinhgad Engineering College, Pune.

"It's fast, the guys have better control over the bot, it's compact and robust," Sharique Ahmad, co-ordinator for the contest explains.

"We just designed it two days before we left for Chennai. It's named after our first amphibian robot which won prizes at IIT Bombay's `Tech Fest' and `Kshitij' at IIT Kharagpur," says B. Prathik of Sinhgad Engineering College.

He and his team-mates Srinivas Choudhary, Krunal Kantale and Anirudh Sah won the mine-detector robot contest at `Shaastra' on Friday.

Remote control

"We came up with aluminium wheels, a belt drive, ball-bearings for additional stability at the base, high torque motors and an aluminium flapper that lets the rival robot onto the slope and then merely pushes it out of the arena," chuckles Prathik, weilding a tiffin box turned into a remote control.

The fight went on late into the night as the crowd cheered on.

Only the fittest will see the light of day.

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