MIT team does well at world University Rover Challenge

Utha: Mars Rover Manipal (MRM) nicknamed “Airawat” finished 7^th out of 36 teams from across the globe in the final round of the 12^th University Rover Challenge (URC) competition held in the desert of Utah, USA from May 31 to June 2, 2018.

University Rover Challenge is an annual competition organized by Mars Society at Hanksville, Utah. 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. 

The members who were part of team which built rover for URC 2018 include Shantam Shorewala, E SuriyaViswanath, Hardik Kothari, Anush Kumar,Tanishq Singla,Abhijit Alok, Ayush Garg, Tushar Shahi, Dixit Ojha, IndupuruSriharsha Reddy, Kulpreet Singh Dhankar, Safal Ajmera, Pratishtha Gupta, Mohammed Salman, Abhinav Goyal, Siril Teja, Sai SyamVinnakota, Pavitra Chundekkad, Joel John, Prakhar Kumar Debata, Inthisar Kunnath, Kavya Banerjee, Sagar Dhaka and Atharv Mudur.