CSD ROBOCON NITK

ABU Robocon

The Ultimate Robotics Contest for Undergraduates

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CSD-Robocon-NITK Team takes part in the Ultimate Robotics Contest for Undergraduates – ABU Robocon. We build Robots that aim at incredible Precision, Reliability and Speed or in other words Industrial performance. Every year (since 2002), one of the member countries of Asia Pacific Broadcasting Union which Doordarshan – India is part of, hosts the ABU Robocon. In August of 2017, ABU Robocon 2018, theme and rules were announced by Vietnam and the journey began for, the First Team from NITK to take part in Robocon.

To take part in Robocon, the team must not only be proficient and innovative in Mechanical Design, Electronics Design and Programming but also back it up with soft skills like Building/Manufacturing skills, Management (Time and Resources and Team Dynamics), but above all must have a constant drive and motivation to keep going ahead.

As a rookie team, we are proud to say, we not only created two bots that reliably complete the task, but made NITK proud, on National Television by baging the “First time Best Usage of MATLAB” Award. Quoting Veer Alakshendra, Student Competition Technical Evangelist, MathWorks India Pvt. Ltd. “The MathWorks team was happy to see the model based design workflow: design, simulate and deploy...”.

To achieve this, we followed a systematic Product Development Approach - from Concept Development, Design Stage, Prototyping to Manufacturing. The Design of Mecanum 4WD for Automatic Bot and Omni Wheel drive used in Manual Bot, were tested in Simulink/MATLAB by MathWorks. The SolidWorks model of the bot’s chassis with the drive assembly were imported into Simulink. Then the inverse kinematics required in control of Holonomic Drive used in the bots were tested in simulation before deploying to hardware. This approach was also expanded to higher layer of control/decision making (Line Following, Path Planning etc.). This approach combined with the professionalism in Simulink program is what won us the Award.



From Conceptualization to Competing, the team has a learnt many lessons and made many mistakes,. But in the following year in ABU Robocon 2019 (Mongolia) we execute the lessons learnt and correct our mistakes and aim for absolute excellence in every aspect of the project.