October 30th saw the Birla Auditorium at Kolkata fill up with robotics aficionados. The event of the day was the annual Kshitij-Robotix workshop and an exhibition of robots at Birla Industrial and Technological Museum .
The workshop is organised every year as an effort to promote both fests and also to impart knowledge of basic robotics among college students from Kolkata and nearby suburbs. The workshop started off with an introductory video of Kshitij, followed by a brief description of the events. The video, a compendium of achievements and highlights of Kshitij and Robotix over the years, created quite an impression .
The Robotix workshop started around noon and for the next one hour the audience was guided through the basics of autonomous robotics. Starting with basic differential drives, the presenters went on to explain how an autonomous robot perceives the surrounding environment and acts independently with the help of sensors and processors. The icing on cake, however, was the demonstration of a working line follower robot which left the audience asking for more.
In addition to the workshop the society also held an exhibition of about 15 working robots at Birla Industrial and Technological Museum accompanied by a one-hour session on “Robotics for Beginners” specifically meant for school children which involved the explanation of the making of the simplest manual robot capable of traversal in 4 directions. Hogged by media spotlights, the event turned out to be a grand success, arousing the curiosity of an audience ranging across ages 5-50. With robots capable of playing soccer, mimicking a goalkeeper and navigating across a grid, the exhibition had something to stir everyone’s interest.
However, the show doesn’t end here as the society has a series of workshops planned before the main event in January with a workshop at Techno India, Salt Lake (6th November) and the annual winter workshop for freshers being next in line. The team expects nothing less from these after positive response received from workshops held at Bangalore, Nagpur and Ludhiana during the Durga Puja holidays.
