eYantra Robotics Competition

e-Yantra Robotics Competition(eYRC) is a national level robotics competition, conducted annually by CSE department, IIT Bombay and sponsored by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India. I was team lead in a team of 4 for this competition. After several stages spanning 6 months, we were placed 1st amongst the 162 selected teams from across India, under the theme ‘Launch a Module’.

The objective was to deposit the correct objects (foam cubes) to their respective matches (stickers placed on the left having identical colour, shape, size) using a Firebird V robot while avoiding obstacles (large red squares) in a fully autonomous manner. The robot only has motor encoders as feedback so it has to be instructed by a computer, which can ‘see’ the arena through an overhead camera. I implemented the image processing stack for detecting all objects, their locations, designed the algorithm for taking the overhead camera frames to find the optimal solution (which uses A* path planning) for a given configuration and also to send step by step instructions to the robot. All this was done on Python and OpenCV. The robot motion, arm control and communication aspects of the Firebird V robot was handled by Chirag Shah.

Here is a video demonstrating our solution:

An alternate system was also designed to carry 3 objects at a time:

The detailed rulebook and all our codes can be found on GitHub – eYRC2016#LM438 on GitHub

A huge shout-out to e-Yantra for hosting this platform and also to the awesome people working behind-the-scenes who make this competition such a wonderful experience!