The campus newspaper of IIT Kharagpur

February ’06, 8th Issue: News Avenue

Sparks of Genius

After rocking the technology scene at IIT Kharagpur for several years now, students from the Innovations Lab are winning laurels at other renowned hubs for scientific and technological advancement as well. At the Engineering Fair 2006, organized by the Birla Industrial and Technolgical Museum, Kolkata, Suryarghya Chakrabarti (3rd Yr. MF), Anshul Sao (3rd Yr. EG) and Rudra Pratap (3rd Yr. MF) from Kgp blew the competition away with their unique combination of creative spark and technological expertise. Their project, entitled, “Real Time Robot Navigation in Dynamic Environments Using Micro-Genetic Algorithms” scored the highest points from a field of 16 teams, all from renowned institutions from around the country. The prize: a splendid amount of Rs. 12,000 to each member to be given as a monthly scholarship for a period of one year. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
The fair was held from 17th to 21st of January 2006 at the Birla Industrial and Technological Museum at Kolkata. As a preliminary round, teams had to present an abstract of their proposed model, which could be any application that could have possible industrial implementation way back in December 2005. The working model was shown during the finals held in January 2006.

The objective of the project was something the junta here is quite accustomed to by now, what with Robotix now an annual event in Kshitij. Given an arena with obstacles, their robot had to find the optimum path to a pre-specified destination while avoiding all collisions. While Anshul was the brains behind the Communication and Image-Processing parts of the operation, Suryarghya handled the research and implementation of genetic algorithms and Rudra was in charge of hardware.
So good was their model that the judges announced publicly that their performance had garnered far more points than the runners-up, a team from the Future Institute of Management.

But wait, there’s more. These guys were not the only ones to emerge with their pockets full from a KGP dominated result-board. Sumandeep Banerjee (4th year ECE), Shubham chopra(4th year ECE) and Arnab Mitra(2nd year EE) won the award for Best Implemented Design for their project on “Web-based Control of Home Appliances”. A cool Rs. 5000 in cash is what they won. Not bad for a day’s work, right??

Wonder exactly how many GPL’s these brainy guys got for all their hard work ?