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Singapore team's robot wins accolades

Staff Reporter

MANUS 1 human has won several awards An eye-catcher at the finals of the Robotics championships held as part of Shaastra 2006

CHENNAI: A robot demonstrated by the team from the National University of Singapore (NUS) won accolades and several fans at the finals of the Robotics championships held as part of Shaastra 2006, the tech festival of IIT-Madras.

Standing 50 cm tall and weighing 2.5 kg, MANUS 1 human is a biped (robot) prototype developed for the study of human gait, motion and sensing, the NUS team members said.

MANUS 1 has won several awards including the FIRA Robot World Cup at Germany 2006, the same event in Singapore in 2005, FIRA Robot World Cup Australia 2003 and the Singapore Robotics Games 2004.

The robot system is fully modularised and is marketed as an open architecture for researchers to modify or add features.

A new event at Shaastra this year had participants rummaging a junkyard near Nandini Café. The challenge is to create an automobile that can carry one person for 50 metre in the fastest time possible.

Over 200 teams tried their luck in the written preliminary round. Six were chosen, with 3 to 4 members in each. Junkyard Wars is a cult game and is already popular on Discovery channel.

It has been incorporated as highly challenging competition at other college culturals in India, but never on such an ambitious scale.

Junkyard Wars

Sachin, a second year student at IIT and coordinator for the event, said the other Junkyard Wars were mostly elaborate puzzles that need ingenuity as well as creativity.

"But this automobile building competition is a first," he said.

Anubhav and Rakesh, who are part of one of the four IIT teams, are busy working on their project. They said it is not just for mechanical engineering students, but anyone with basic knowledge of engineering.

The competition culminates in a race on Sunday morning to decide the winning creation.

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