By Kalwinder Kaur
The Indian Institute of Bombay (IITB) declared the launch of 'E-Yantra', a pan India robotics challenge. This initiative includes a unique format. By providing students with a robot developed at IIT-Bombay, E-Yantra inspires engineering students to use these robots for creating solutions to pre-set tasks.
E-Yantra'
This initiative will enable undergraduate (UG) engineering students to pursue their career in robotics by incorporating it in various disciplines.
IIT Bombay anticipates that the 'E-Yantra' platform will drive the youth in India to intellectually create utility-based robotic applications for varied disciplines. The overall mission is to develop a valuable eco-system of ideas and applications to promote the growth curve and productivity of the country via intelligent incorporation of robotics within educational initiatives especially in the area of embedded systems.
Under the National Mission for ICT in Education (NMEICT) program, E-Yantra has been sponsored by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD). As part of this initiative, practical learning-infrastructure will be provided to engineering students. A small robot developed by the team at IIT-Bombay enables students to solve the issues. Professors Krithi Ramamritham and Kavi Arya of the institute's CSE Department have depicted E-Yantra.
Unlike the traditional way, the students are being presented with a commodity robot as well as existing open source code base for modeling an innovative solution.
IIT Bombay’s 'open-source' E-Yantra initiative intends developing the contemporary class of Indian embedded systems engineers with a practical view for solving intricacies.
The pan-India E-Yantra challenge welcomes all UG engineering students. Programming a particular robotic platform enables solving specific problem using specific resources. This 12-week long process will be followed by participation in National Robotics Competition. Final competition will be held at the IITB Techfest in January 2013. Around 120 teams having 4 members in each team will be selected for the competition.
IITB makes the use of Open Source platform feasible. The material developed in this initiative is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Source: http://www.iitb.ac.in/