e-YRC 2013 at IIT-Bombay was Successful With Students Made To Design Robots To Aid Agriculture

The e-Yantra Robotics Competition 2013 (e-YRC 2013), event that held at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay). had seen some outstanding finalists who have successfully created some astonishing Robots that are capable from sowing seeds in a farm, removal of  weeds, fertilizing crops and as well as plucking  fruits from trees to store at one place. The  e-Yantra Robotics Competition 2013 with having theme as 'Urban Agriculture' provided a platform to students to display their knowledge and programming skills in Embedded system and Robotics to solve real life problems. Each of the competent teams were given a Robotic kit, with accessories, to build an application based machine, on the theme assigned to them, as told by Dr. Saraswathi Kirthivasan, Senior Program Manager, E-Yantra project.

Agriculture is a major industry in India but despite being self-sufficient, it faces problem at every stage of food production, leading to inadequate production besides, wastage of food grains, seeing the problem the eYRC-2013 aims to bring awareness to problems. Through the competition, various team of students from across India have worked and come up with prototypes of robots like the seed sowing robot, weeding robot, fertilizing robot and fruit plucking robot, as told by Prof. Kavi Arya, Principal Investigator, Project E-Yantra. The other aim of the meticulously concepted competition was to provide solutions to problems that farms in large scale face.

• The competition was highly rewarding for both the parties as well as students as during the process of creating these prototypes, students received  a chance to gain more knowledge of concepts of the Embedded systems, micro-controller programming and hone their communication skills as well. The winners (not necessarily in the order of 1st, 2nd, 3rd) were as follows:
• The top teams under the category of Seed Sowing Robot belonged to Walchand College of Engineering, Sangle; K J Somaiya College of Engineering, Mumbai; BITS Pilani, Goa
• The top positions for the Weeding Robot went to students from Dharmsinh Desai University, Nadiad and R.V. College of Engineering, Bangalore.

The teams that did very well in the competition for Fertilizing Robots were from again from K J Somaiya College of Engineering, Mumbai; Dr. D Y Patil College of Engineering, Pune; and Jawaharlal Nehru National College of Engineering, Shimoga. 
Over 6,000 registrations from students for participating in e-YRC 2013 competition from around the country were seen.