COMPETITIONS | kbalasubramanianwpi

AMAZON PICKING CHALLENGE, ICRA 2015

Please refer the Projects section under CV for the task description of the event and our team's progress.

SHELL-ECO MARATHON ASIA, PHILIPPINES 2014

Shell Eco-marathon challenges student teams from around the world to design, build and test ultra energy-efficient vehicles. With annual events first in the Americas, then Europe and Asia, the winners are the teams that go the furthest using the least amount of energy. The events spark debate about the future of mobility and inspire young engineers to push the boundaries of fuel efficiency.

The event was hosted by Philippnes in February 2014. The objective of this event was to design a fuel efficient car. We constructed a fuel efficient hybrid vehicle powered by both battery and fuel. Hybrid technology was new to us and we were passionated by the design from leading car manufacturers.

On the process of prototyping a hybrid vehicle, we came across many hardships like power mismatch, phase lead/lag, mistiming in switching the modes. Overcoming these obstacles needed a deep understanding in Power Electronics and Electrical Machines. This project taught me to work with high power machineries and actuators. I successfully designed and implemented the electronic circuit to enable autonomous switching of power modes between fuel and battery operation. Implemented several safety precautions and automatic alerting system inside the car . The safety precautions included measures like monitoring the engine cabin temperature continuously, dock lock, seat belts, common ground connections and so on.

The car had to be shipped from India to Philippines which would normally take two weeks. Unfortunately, the car underwent a heavy damage while being shipped. Our team of ten, redesigned the entire vehicle only in two days to repair the detriment occurred. The circuits inside the car were designed, installed and tested in less than two days. Our three sleepless nights were rewarded with the “Perseverance and Team spirit award”. The organizers were impressed by our tireless work without giving up hopes.

Although we did not make big success, I learnt that light weighed cars made of special type of alloys of aluminum or fiber materials are highly fuel efficient given the same fuel for engine. It was a great experience on being a part of this event.

FIRST TECH CHALLENGE - RING IT UP ! , INDIA, 2013

This event was sponsored and organized by Caterpillar Inc., India. The main objective of this event is to design an autonomous and tele-operated differential drive robot with a robotic arm that is capable of picking a ring from a peg and placing it in another peg. This task is to be repeated multiple times with higher complexity.

I was the captain of the team of seven that successfully constructed a seven Degrees of Freedom differentially driven robotic arm to perform the above mentioned task. The robot was constructed using Lego kits. ROBOTC for LegoMindstorm NXT was used to program the robot and labVIEW was used for simulation and programming as well.

My contribution to this project was to devise the autonomous navigation of the robot. The robot has to autonomously move towards an IR source to pick the ring. The Signal strength and the directional value from the IR beacon fitted the robot served as the feedback for autonomous navigation. Along with this, I supported the mechanical team in modeling and constructing the robot. We were the finalist of the event.