Mumbai: IIT Bombay student team and mentor Prof. Abhishek Gupta that has won the world finals of this year’s American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) student design competition (SDC) held at Tampa, USA on November 5, 2017. This team had earlier won the Asia-Pacific leg of the competition en route to the finals.

ASME SDC provides a platform for engineering students to present solutions to a range of design problems ranging from everyday household tasks to groundbreaking space exploration. Each team is required to design, construct and operate a prototype meeting the requirements of an annually determined problem statement.

This year’s problem statement was a robot pentathlon i.e., building a remotely controlled device that competes in five events viz., lift, sprint, climb, throw and hit.

IIT Bombay team’s robot secured first place in sprint, lift and hit events, second place in the throw event and third place in the climb event. It was placed first overall in a pool of 8 best teams from Asia-Pacific, North America and South America. The robot of the U of Mississippi team was the runner-up.

The team operated under the umbrella of Umesh Mashruwala Innovation Cell (UMIC). The team got most of the funding from IRCC. IITBHF funded a part of the travel cost.

Team composition (all are UGs):

Akash Kishore (Final year, ME), Team Leader

Ravi Jain (Final year, ME)

Anjan Kumar Patel (Final year, ME)

Deepak (Third year, AE)

Ayush (Third year, ME)

Pravin (Second year, MEMS)

Atharva (Second year, ChE)

Ritesh (Second year, EE)

Nishit (Second year, CE)

Manik (Second year, ME).

Earlier this year, another team from UMIC had won the 25th Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (IGVC) [@Oakland University, Michigan], the biggest unmanned ground vehicle competition in the world for university students.

A UMIC team is now focusing on the ‘Mahindra Rise Driverless Car Challenge’ to be held in January 2018. You may notice the vehicle on the KV road from time to time! They are also targeting the International Aerial Robotics Challenge in August 2018.