Mars Rover MIT excel at world meet in US

Team Udayavani, Jun 10, 2019, 11:46 AM IST

Manipal: Mars Rover Manipal, the student rover design team from Manipal Institute of Technology blazed a glorious trail at the 13^th edition of University Rover Challenge held in Utah, USA from May 30 to June 1, 2019.

MRM, Manipal Academy of Higher Education’s official team powered by Mouser Electronics and Echjay Industries was the winner among the Asian challengers and finished 8th globally out of the 84 teams that participated. MRM also won the Barainca award for the best Science team in the competition.

For the 4th consecutive year, MRM has been amongst the top 36 international teams and was one of the only 5 teams from India to make it to the final stage of URC’ 19 at the Mars Desert Research System along with IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, VIT Vellore and SRM.

University Rover Challenge (URC) is the world’s premier robotics competition for undergraduate students. Held in the desert of southern Utah, URC challenges interdisciplinary student teams to design and build the next generation of Mars Rovers.

These rovers are designed to be capable of traversing and performing tasks on Mars-simulated terrain, in goals of aiding human exploration of the red planet. The competition requires participants to complete 4 missions – the Science Mission, the Autonomous Traversal mission, the Extreme Retrieval and Delivery Mission and the Equipment Servicing mission.

The team was led by Safal Ajmera and V. Sai Shyam. The rest of the team members are: Siril Teja Dukkipati, Ajay Rangan, Tushaar Neb, Nishesh Singh, Ayush Parashar, Akash Yadav, Anandmayi Bhongade, Somesh Paranjpe, Kshitij Patil, Neil Doshi, Mohammed Mohsin H, Ved Chitnis, Agniv Saikia, Gaurav K H, Tanmay Shukla, M Aditya Sharma, Aditya Kolpe, Laksh Pahuja, Anmol Kumar, Karthik Datta, Mohammad Abdul Sulaiman, Sai Raghu Teja Davuluri, Sheena Kapoor, Vedant Dhonagde, Atharv Mudur, Kavya Banerjee, Abhijit Alok, Rakshit Tewari, Rachit Shah, Shaun Meric Menezes, Bladen Martin, Harshit Sharma, Sayantika Paul, Akanksha Kaushal, Akshat Tulsani

“It was a wonderful experience of leading a team in an international competition. It was great to see the hard work by the team members has brought success. We got to learn many things and just wanted to make everyone proud. The feeling of representing the institute and country cannot be expressed,” said Safal Ajmera.

“The team has been remarkable at work since the start. It has been a wonderful experience during the competition, lots to learn and showcase. In the end, we just wanted our well-wishers to be proud of everything we did,” remarked the other leader of the team, V. Sai Shyam.