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When robots turned soccer players
Sushanta Talukdar
| IIT techno-management festival features robot manoeuvres enabled by students |
ANDROID ACTION: A soccer match at IIT-Guwahati on Friday.
Guwahati: Who plays better football, man or robot? Students of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) here hosted a unique event of "robo-soccer" in which 78 robots designed by techno-savvy students from across the country played football matches with one another.
Remote-controlled, these four- or three-wheeled robo-players zigzagged on a wooden arena measuring 230cmX125cm, manoeuvring a table tennis ball with a mechanical device powered by electric motors. The `players' sought to push the ball through the goalposts while the `goalkeepers' sought to defend their goals. A capacity crowd cheered the teams. Each of the 10-minute duration matches was full of fun and excitement. The "robo-soccer" drew in the crowds at the three-day Techniche 2006, the annual techno-management festival hosted by IIT-Guwahati.
Aside from the `players', there were more intelligent robots at the event showing off their skills of artificial intelligence. Some of them were crawling in a partially predefined maze to reach the destination line in the minimum time under the fully autonomous robotics Path-Finder competition. Each robot was allocated 15 minutes of access to the maze after the 5-minute sensor adjustment time.
Another event was `Maze Solver', which involved moving a computer-controlled robot through a maze and reaching the destination circle. It was placed at the starting point and the aim was to identify the circle and a possible path to reach the circle. The computer program drove the robots to the destination point.
The students, from various IITs, engineering colleges and schools, participated also in other challenging events. These included `Deep Purple,' which involved designing a prototype model submarine capable of two-dimensional motion under water.
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