Pune students shine at IIT-B tech fest
The four students, Aryan Chaubal, Zyfn Kothavala, Neel Acharya and Sanjana Basavraj, were part of a team (27 member group of students of age group 10-16) from Victorious Kidss Educares, St Mary’s School and the Bishops School
Four students from Pune have won the Cozmo Clench competition at Techfest 2018-19 hosted by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay, from December 14 to 16, 2018. The competition saw 150 teams participating from all across the country.
The four students, Aryan Chaubal, Zyfn Kothavala, Neel Acharya and Sanjana Basavraj, were part of a team (27 member group of students of age group 10-16) from Victorious Kidss Educares, St Mary’s School and the Bishops School.
Cozmo clench competition requires the participants to complete ‘pick and place’ tasks, through an obstacle course, with their robots within six minutes. Each of these teams have to build their own unique robots to solve the problem, said a statement issued by IIT Bombay techfest team for Cozmo clench competition.
The team, which with Aryan as the captain won the competition, completed the tasks in a record time of one minute and 26 seconds and scored 464 points overall. “They won the competition by a huge margin as the team that secured the second position in the finals had completed the tasks in three minutes and were constantly practising in their IIT hostels and had a fixed strategy for each of the tasks that they were running through and kept improving throughout the three days,” said Mallick.
“This helped them improve their timings with their well-designed and robust robots which is our focus of study and where we encourage the students to build innovative instructional programmes in robotics, automation education and developing educational robots and kits,” he added.
Aryan Chaubal, Class 9 student, said, “We were a group of 4 students, all working together under the guidance of our teachers at Lydnow Robotics during our brainstorming sessions and we came up with new problems, new solutions and most importantly new ideas. But that’s the essence of brainstorming, you put anything and everything that you can think of down on paper, this way you can eradicate setbacks and furthermore create viable design ideas that you have your trust in.”
Zyfn Kothavala (13) , a student of The Bishop's School, Camp, who was also part of the team, said, “Our focus when we started was to find an optimal solution for the Cozmo Clench problem statement. We finally settled on a wired robot, with a rotating base that could place the block anywhere in a 180 degree radius. We spent about two months building it, working every Saturday from morning to evening. The benefits of the selected approach were that we moved the complexity into the remote and having a turntable gave the robot great flexibility. We were incredibly excited to hear that we had won after a thrilling and satisfying Techfest 2018.”
The students were trained by Lydnow Robotics, Pune. The teams were sent to enter the wild card round held on December 14 and 15 at IIT, Bombay. The wild card round offers on spot opportunity to participants to secure a spot in the final rounds of the competition. Generally, wild card rounds are for students and teams that are not able to participate in the zonal rounds. Wild card rounds see the most fierce competition in the entire tournament due to it do or die format.
“At least 100 teams participated in the wild card round and 10 teams were to be selected based on their performance and points scored. These 10 teams would then proceed to the finals where they would compete along with teams that previously qualified through zonal competitions held in September 2018. Three teams from Lydnow Robotics made it to the top 10 in the wild card round and on December 16, this team of four made it to the finals and won it,” said Arijit Mallick, founder, director – training, Lydnow Robotics.
Lydnow Robotics is a fast-growing training and consulting company in robotics and automation in Pune. Lydnow’s diversified expertise extends across the educational and industrial sectors.