I wrote this article for the mechanical society magzine a few days back to motivate my juniors...
"Its a new day,
Its a new start,
Its alive with the beating of young hearts."
One wonders whether Bryan Adams thought of the depth these lines carry in ones life. Every minute is a fresh moment and every second is a new start. Innovation is the new mantra of life and the better you understand it, the better it will be to open a new world of variety and that of versatility. In this fast moving and dynamic world, if one adheres to past he will surely stagnate.
The Diwali of September 2006 saw the beginning of a new era for all of my group mates. It was around 4 am in the morning and our first completely autonomous robot was just about to be given its final touches before its first trial run. We were already exhausted as none of us had slept since the past 48 hrs but the excitement of achieving something big was dominating on our biological clock of sleeping. Prashant was giving the last mechanical touches to the sensors while Gautam was checking the circuit for the final time. We placed the bot on the track and it moved nicely to cover half of the track. It left the track after covering half the distance but we knew what had gone wrong. We knew that the light of the room was affecting our LDR sensors so we covered the sensors in such a way so that no more unwanted light could harm its action. And finally at 4:45 am after working continuously for more than 48 hrs, our first autonomous robot was working flawlessly. Little did we know that this was just the beginning.
Before i go any further let me throw some light on my group mates and our group. Gautam Kumar- an expert in electronics. Give him any circuit, just any circuit and he will complete it before you can blink your eyes . He is the kind of guy who wants to make a big impression in this world. And I’ll run short of words when i talk about Prashant Sinha. Master of all and jack of none. A guy whose interest varies from History to Music, from science to arts. You name anything , and i bet Prashant
can give you tough competition in that field. Not often you find people like Prashant in this world ; having so much capability yet so much down to earth. And lastly, gaurav srivastava and I manage the programming part of our robots.
Coming back to the robotics part- we came back from our new year break and everyone was missing home once again. But in between our settling in the new semester we decided that we would take part in the robotics competition that was being held at ITER within 3 days. We carefully read the problem statement and concluded that our previous robot could be placed in the competition. The moment of truth arrived on 20th jan , 2007 when we placed our bot on the arena . Ours was the third to be placed on the arena and then we saw something that none of my group mates had expected-- we got a standing ovation from everyone present at the competition, even our competitors. The moment made us feel that the sleepless nights that we had gone through did not get wasted. We knew the the competition was well within our reach and our estimation didn’t go wrong. We won the first and second prizes at ITER. Next was IIT , Kharagpur. This was a real test of patience and character. You always get to learn a lot when you clash with the best in your field irrespective of whether you win or lose. We reached IIT with one day remaining before the competition. We gave the final touches to our new robot which we had made specially for this big event but to our utter surprise and disappointment our robot was not responding as it was in our hostel. We kept working on it through the whole night.
The sensors had stopped responding and so did our robot. We kept working throughout the day of the competition , the day being one of the toughest in our life. This was real world, Real competition. A place where everyone was far away from the luxuries of home and everyone had to do everything himself. No mom, dad , brother or sister to take care of you anymore. It was us against the whole world.
We knew that the shore was very far away from our ship so finally we packed our bags and went to cheer the remaining teams from our college. The disappointment of blowing up of sensors got reduced as another team of our college won the first prize in that very competition. Suddenly a new energy got into us and we started enjoying rather than being disappointed . After all ,the first prize came to our college itself.
We came back from Kharagpur and the pain of not performing at Kharagpur had not even healed as we started working for our robots which we took to NIT rourkela. In my personal opinion , i felt that the competition here was much better than that at IIT kharagpur. At last our robot did not ditch us this time and we got the first and third prizes for our robots. The win here reduced the pain caused by losing at IIT.
One more competition was at our door step . This time in our own college. What would it mean if we win everywhere but not in our college. So we decided to take part in our college's techfest and got the first prize over there also.
This was still not the end. With teammates like Prashant and Gautam , this was just the beginning. We decided to take part in the international level autonomous robotics competition - micromouse at IIT Bombay. This new aim gave a new mission to all my teammates. The international level competition - micromouse is supposed to be the toughest autonomous robotics competition in Asia. With teams from Iran ,Sri Lanka and other countries, the competition was surely of a huge level. Ours was not the only team from KIIT. We had a group of seniors , headed by Nilav Ghosh , also in the same competition. The prelims took place and out of 150 teams which were participating in the competition , around 15 of them made it to the finals. Luckily, nothing went wrong this time and we made it to the finals. I could feel that lady luck was finally giving us our due share. We did not win the competition - the honours were done by teams from IIT Bombay and teams from Iran, but we became the first team from KIIT to reach the finals of any international level robotics competition. I could smell that victory was soon to be ours. We came back from IIT Bombay on the morning of 30th jan 2008 and left for IIT Kharagpur the very next day. We had more group mates this time. Our team included Anindip Dwari (mech), Amit Shah (mech), Prashant Sinha(mech) and me - Mohit Nigam (mech). This time we tried our luck on a different event. We made an autonomous robot using a camera - an image processing autonomous robotics event. And we made two robots instead of one, thus improving our probability of winning the event. The night of 3rd Feb., 2008 finally proved to be a big night for all of us as both our robots tied for the first position. This was the last robotics competition in which we took part and we thus ended our series of robotics competitions on a winning note.
With life taking a new turn , Gautam, Gaurav and I started a company of our own (I was the first to leave the company soon after its initiation - due to personal reasons) “Roboticwares” which is head quartered at Nayapalli and has some big names of Bhubaneswar associated with it. I wish good luck to my other teammates who are presently running the company and hope some day this very company visits KIIT for campus recruitment.
