A Robot is an electro-mechanical device that is capable of reacting to its environment, making decisions on its own and taking actions in order to achieve a task. Its functionality has grown exponentially and it now has applications in various industries like defence, manufacturing and other commercial applications. Human and robot interaction, over a period of time, is going to be more complex; hence, it has become important to be aware of the basic functioning of robots.
The Robo-thon workshop in Chennai-Pallavaram was conducted by two IIT Madras Alumni, Rathees P and Rinkesh Virani who have had the experience of creating robots in the past. The first part of the workshop included a session where various parts such as chassis, DC motors, castor, wheels, 12V DC battery, switches, wires and some other tools to fix it were provided to the participants to assemble and make a remote controlled, 2-wheeler robot which was a full functional working model which could be operated by any participant.
In the second part of the workshop, the participants worked with autonomous robots, learning how to program the robot and direct it to perform a task, like following a line. A line follower robot senses the colour of a path and moves in the projected direction. Participants were provided with a white chart paper along with black tapes to make challenging patterns for the line follower robot to trace. The functioning of the robot was explained to the participants by introducing the IR LED sensor, photodiode, resistor and variable resistor; all of which are critical for a robot to operate independently. Various patterns were made for the line follower to trace. The students challenged the Robot and tested its agility to follow tough patterns.
The workshop in Bengaluru was conducted by an organisation named Cretile. It was struc-tured for students from different backgrounds and each component of a robot was explained in detail. This demonstration and knowledge transfer started from the very basics; explaining the meaning of transmitter, receiver, sensors, etc.
‘ROBO-THON’, was indeed a step towards making our youth Robo-Ready!
