MANIPAL:
Mars Rover Manipal (MRM) nicknamed “Airawat” finished seventh out of 36 teams from across the globe in the final round of the 12 th University Rover Challenge (URC) competition held from May 31 to June 2, 2018 in the desert of Utah, USA.
It is organized by Mars Society at Hanksville, Utah annually. The Manipal Institute of Technology students had yet another reason to feel happy about. Their performance was better than all the five other teams from India in the fray.
“The experience was exhilarating. To see the year-long efforts pay off on the three days of competition was a wonderful feeling. Apart from this, the opportunity to meet hundreds of students from some of the best robotics teams in the world was a unique and enriching experience,” said an elated Shantam Shorewala, leader of the team.
University Rover Challenge is a part of the global Rover Challenge Series powered by the Mars Society which is an American worldwide non-profit organization promoting the human exploration and settlement of the planet Mars. The aim of University Rover Challenge is to encourage students to develop skills in the field of robotics and improve the state of the art in rovers and work in multi-disciplinary teams in collaboration between scientists and engineers.
The competition consists of four part Science Cache Task, Extreme Retrieval and Delivery Task, Equipment Servicing Task, and the Autonomous Traversal Task. Each task consists of 100 points. MRM secured the 3rd position in Extreme Retrieval and Delivery Task – the most challenging of all the tasks.
List of team members who were part of team which built rover for URC 2018. Shantam Shorewala, E Suriya Viswanath, Hardik Kothari, Anush Kumar, Tanishq Singla, Abhijit Alok, Ayush Garg, Tushar Shahi, Dixit Ojha (150909248), Indupuru Sriharsha Reddy (150929070), Kulpreet Singh Dhankar, Safal Ajmera, Pratishtha Gupta, Mohammed Salman, Abhinav Goyal, Siril Teja, Sai Syam Vinnakota, Pavitra Chundekkad, Joel John, Prakhar Kumar Debata, Inthisar Kunnath, Kavya Banerjee, Sagar Dhaka, Atharv Mudur.
