Report of two day workshop on “Autonomous Robotics with AVR Microcontrollers”

The ISTE student chapter of SMVITM in association with Robosapiens Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi organized a two-day workshop on Autonomous Robotics with AVR Microcontrollers and a zonal level competition in Robotics on 21 and 22 September 2103 at the institute.

The workshop was inaugurated by Mr. Prajwal Kumar, Managing Director, Robautonics Pvt. Ltd., Mangalore.  During his inaugural speech, Mr. Kumar outlined a brief history of Robotics and elaborated on its applications and scope.

The resource persons Mr.  Ashish Kumar and Mr. Thithiksh Vats, research engineers with Robosapiens Pvt. Ltd New Delhi, delineated their organization’s work in the field and welcomed the participants to the workshop.

Mr. Ratnakumar, Secretary, SSVMET was the Guest of Honour on the occasion. Prof.  Nagaraja Rao, Head Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering briefed about the objectives and scope of the workshop and Prof. Dr. Ganesha A, Dean (Academics) presided over the function.

The inaugural was followed by hands-on training and the workshop. The first session on day one was on topics like basics of robot electronics, basic electronic components, fundamental electrical concepts, transistors, motor drivers sensors, OpAmp bread boarding techniques and interfacing of sensors

The 2^nd session of the day dealt with the basics of a microcontroller. The focus was on the AVR series micro controller, ATMega16, which is one of the most powerful and widely used 8 bit micro controllers.

On day two, the morning session was on Development of an edge avoiding robot on i-BOT Robokit:  a bot which never falls off the edge of a table. It has protruding sensors, which can detect beforehand what lies ahead – whether it is the table surface or its end. When it detects an end, it turns assessing the distance between its wheels and the protruding distance of sensors from the main body of the bot. This results in a mechanism, which turns the robot in the appropriate direction whenever the limit of the table – or any elevated surface for that matter – ends, and thus never lets the bot fall off the table.

The Next session was about the development of a Line Following Robot on iBOT Robokit  and a Light Searching Robot on iBOT Robokit.

In the last session, the resource persons organized a competition to develop a small project on robotics. The winners (the first three groups) of this zonal level competition will be participating at a national level robotics championship that will be held at IIT Delhi in March 2014.

The following groups emerged as the winners of the competition.

Group 1

Vignesh                               (5^th sem CSE)

Sumanth Kumar                (5^th sem CSE)

Pritam Shetty                      (5^th sem ME)

Prabhakar Rao                  (5^th sem ME)

Group 2

Akshatha M.Prabhu           (3^rd sem ECE)

Anujna S.Rai                       (3^rd sem ECE)

Priyanka K.R.Bhat              (3^rd sem ECE)

Kanika D.Shetty                  (3^rd sem ECE)

Group 3

Nikhil Acharya                     (3^rd sem ECE)

Fervez Jaffer B.M                (3^rd sem ECE)

Rayan Christ D’souza       (3^rd sem ECE)

Manoj                                    (3^rd sem CSE)

The workshop, with its hands on sessions, was very much informative and helpful to students. The workshop ended with a vote of thanks by Prof. Nagaraja Rao, Head of the Department of Electronics & Communication.