Utkarsh Sinha

The ipBot was the first ever robotics project I made. Besides me, there were 3 other friends along with me in this project. We made it for an event called (guess!) “IPBot” held at our techfest (Quark, at BITS-Pilani, Goa Campus).

The aim of this event was to make a robot that would take images from a webcam hung above the arena, and reach STOP by moving only on the red coloured blocks. The rules of this competition were:

• The bot had 3 minutes to reach STOP.
• For every red block covered we got 30 points.
• For every wrong block 20 points were deducted.
• If you reached STOP before 3 minutes, you’d get bonus points based on the amount of time left.
• If you exceeded the time limit, any further blocks covered would be ignored.

Our bot was one of the most advanced bots that competed at the event, and we won the first prize! It was a very great feeling for the four of us: none of us had ever made a robot, neither had we done any image processing, nor did we know much about electronics! Everything was done during the one month we spent on the bot!

Features of the bot

• A feedback system: the bot checks its orientation at every turn to make sure it moves in a straight line. If an incorrect turn is made, it tries to rectify its orientation before moving on.
• The rock solid image processing took care of ambient light, mis-aligned blocks, tiny gaps between blocks, and noisy images..
• The superb path finding algorithm found the best possible path based on various parameters (bot speed, turn speed, etc).

Pics

The body, complete	Initial test sessions
The eliminations	The finals!!

The team

Maya, Baba, <whatever-nick-you-want>, Doggy… everyone tired after the exhausting day