Team Anveshak
My Work | | Links:
A team of 30, engineering a powerful semi-autonomous rover for mars exploration
I have been an active member of this team and I am currently presiding over the team. We had a successful maiden participation in the University Rover Challenge in 2017 in my tenure of being the head. I have worked in several sub-teams - Electronics division, Media and design, Chassis design and TeRA.
Electronics team
November 2015
I began my work as an electronics engineer in late 2015. I was working on the main controller board of the rover and majorly focused on conceptualizing architecture for the controller board. Unfortunately I don’t have pictures or records of this phase to illustrate my work. This phase of being in the team facilitated accelerated learning and let me explore electronics to a great extent.
Head, Control and Electronics
Q3-Q4 2016
With an ambition to build a new team and train them, we conducted a recruitment drive which helped us take in about 10-15 people into the team. I have been known for not being a soft guy to deal with. After painful efforts, I was fairly successful in establishing a direction for the electronics, for our imaginary rover. Having to deal with people and getting them to do the job was a unique experience and helped me get some really good friends.
Head, Chassis design
Q1 2017
It was just few months before the competition and we were stuck on the chassis design with an irresponsible friend of mine. Sounds like a complain but dealing with this was certainly a tough job and eventually, as it got intolerable, it was time for me to take the job over and having been inclined towards mechanical design, I was motivated sufficiently to take it up for the team. I was decently exposed to the CAD software and I found Fusion 360 to be the most intuitive one. It took a rebellion to get the entire team to adopt Fusion 360 but it was all worth the efforts. I never gave up on endorsing it (I wasn’t paid for that!). Then followed the 4 days during which I, along with a bunch of people, showered insane efforts on getting the first render of our Rover. I would like to credit a close brother of mine - Akshay Molawade, for a well-planned execution of the manufacturing in the coming months. We gave birth to a new design team that was just unstoppable.
University Rover Challenge 2017, MDRS, Utah
May 2017
This was probably one of the most memorable trips I have had till date. We were a 11 member group participating in the competition for the very first time. Carrying Rover in our luggage and clearing the official procedures was certainly an exciting challenge to deal with. Below are few of the captured moments worth taking a look at.
Logo design
December 2017
Nothing much to describe here except for one important learning I made - things like music, paintings and graphic arts are made to please people and your perspective loses its worth if it doesn’t fit well with the majority’s. How much ever great your vision or talent is, not being able to express it in a convincing manner could be extremely frustrating.
With differences in color scheme, shapes and whole ideas entirely, you can see numerous variants of the logo design before we went ahead and finalized on the last one.
Website development
December 2017
Again, this month got me busy with webpage development for our team and let the website speak for itself. ANVESHAK!. Glad to have been assisted by Abhijeet on this. Credits to the amazing jekyll theme - Hydejack - which is the same one being used on this website as well.
Finman - A finance managing portal for Team Anveshak
Jan 2018
Here’s a project I took up in collaboration with Achu before my semester began. Completely written in PHP, this a web-portal for tracking the expenses, invoices and generating automated statements. Having managed the finance for a long time, I realized that people consider it to be an unrewarding bull-work. This was how finman got initiated. The portal has been live since the end of this January. Below are some screenshots of finman.
TeRA - Tele-operated Robotic arm
Q1 2018
I am currently investing most of my time on the development of a powerful robotic arm TeRA and below is a render of the same. We have already manufactured a version of it and currently we are reworking on some components to improve the performance.
Apart from the general supervision, major focus of mine has been on the gripper. In later half of 2017, I had spent my time on designing and prototyping an innovative coupled actuation mechanism for the gripper which was plug and play and could be operated wirelessly. Below is the video of the same.
During the same period I developed an obsession towards laser cutting and this time the gripper was entirely built on laser cut parts. You can check the SAR video out for some of the gripper clips.
Teaser video and SAR Video
Feb 2018
Here’s when I planned to realize my inclination towards video making and out of nowhere, I had come up with a plan to release a 40 sec teaser. Thanks to Abhijeet, we have been able to pull it off in two days. This was the first time I was using a NLE and curiosity is what it took to put things together.
It didn’t stop here. The system acceptance review video for URC 2018 was due 2nd March and we were in preparations of making the video. This was my first ever experience in cinematography and direction. In a chase of acquiring amazing shots wherever possible, we collected over 400GB of raw video content. BGM is something that is still not up to mark but the compilation process has been very memorable - thanks to huge help from Sankalp Chap.
UPDATE!
March 22, 2018
We have qualified for URC 2018! We got through SAR and our team will be heading to Utah yet again!
More information on this can be found here