IIT Bombay to host eYantra Robotics Competition on March 18-19.
The Finals of IIT Bombay’s e-Yantra Robotics Competition, in its fourth year, will be held on the campus on March 18-19, 2016. The two-day event, will witness teams from all across the country competing with each other for the coveted prize and the opportunity to intern at IIT Bombay.
The theme for eYRC this year is ‘Smart Services’. Students have to develop indigenous solutions using robotics to engineer delivery services, hotel services, hazardous waste handling and emergency Services. The competition aims at bringing awareness among students about how technology can be used to provide solutions to many problems that we face in our day-to-day lives and also provide them a common platform to showcase their talent. Teams from Engineering colleges based in Mumbai, Mathura, Shillong, Nadiad (Gujarat), Shimoga (Karnataka), Kanyakumari and Erode (Tamilnadu) are part of the final leg of the competition.
The IIT e-Yantra project believes that a competition framework harnesses the intellectual ability of young Indians to create practical solutions to real problems. The domains range across — manufacturing, defence, smart homes, city maintenance and service industries. It does this by engaging young students in Project Based Learning, where they learn to solve problems using a robot. The goal of the IIT Bombay based e-Yantra project is to, in a scalable manner, create a cadre of engineers to address problems that a rapidly growing economy such as India so sorely needs.
Talking about the project Prof. Kavi Arya, Principal Investigator, e-Yantra project said, “We want to create resources that will contribute to “Make in India.” The project is setting up e-Yantra labs throughout the country in engineering colleges. The value proposition to a college is that if they spend Rs. 2 lakh on a lab and volunteer 4 teachers to be trained, e-Yantra trains the teachers and helps them set up a lab in 4-5 months”
Over the past 2 years, 150 labs have been established and another 80 are in the pipeline – with a target of 500 labs in 3 years. The project’s mission is to evolve these labs into “Innovation Hubs” that eventually become the basis for indigenous solutions to local industrial problems and also encourage regional entrepreneurship.
The e-Yantra project is sponsored by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), under the National Mission for Education through ICT (NMEICT) to provide hands-on learning infrastructure to students who have limited access to labs and mentors. IITB, promotes and encourages the use of Open Source platforms. Hence, the material developed in the project is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
