Expyre

This (i.e."Expyre") was the name of the firefighting robot we built for a competition called "Shaastra" which is the annual technical event of IIT Madras (not IIT Chennai) which took place from the 7th till 10th of october 2004. This was the first time that a firefighting robot contest was held in india at a national level. One such event is held annually in Trinity College, USA and some other american colleges also have similar firefighting robotics contests. The task to be acomplished by the robots was : to find and extinguish a lit candle in a 2.5m*2.5m model house, which had four rooms. The complete problem statement with the house plan can be seen at :http://www.shaastra.org/events/robotics/firefighter . In fact the IITM guys had juct copied this year's Trinity College competition satement. The floor plan was exactly the same as that of the trinity competition. This was a good thing in a way , that the plan was an alredy tested one. My team mates for this competition were Gagan Awhad and Anvit Phatak , both frpm VIT. Gagan is a pretty technically inclined person who had taken part in some project competitions before this one. He is also a big music fan. Anvit is a comp engg guy , always scores well in exams and plays a lot of sports. The three of us were not friends (read buddies/pals) as such, before we decided to form a team and I still cannot exactly reason out how we came together. So you see, it was a pretty risky decision in the sense, we could have failed in the attempt. But as it has turned out we were a pretty good team, and also won the competition. Winning it was pretty simple in the end, as there was no other team present who could complete the given task. Since ours was the only robot that actually worked, we got first place. There were no second or third place prizes given. Shaastra as a whole was a really nice experience; much better than techfest in IIT Bombay. More on this issue later though. There were other teams from Pune present at Shaastra, who also did pretty well in general. Nikhil K of the "mountolympus" blog won the open hardware contest there with two of his college mates. Cheers to them. Also there were two other teams from VIT there who qualified for the finals of their respective events. So it was a pretty good outing for the pune teams.