One of the 2 badminton playing robots using a double pneumatic actuation mechanism.
We achieved $11^{th}$ rank among the 80 teams that participated from different technical institutions from all across India.
ROBOCON is an Asia-Pacific robotics competition held every year with different problem statements. The problem statements are carefully curated to encourage design innovations in the field of robotics. The problem statement for the year 2015 was to make 2 robots that will play a doubles badminton match with the other team’s robots. The choice of fully automated vs manual robots was provided by the organisers. I was a part of the 21 member team that took part in the competition represting my alma mater, IIT Kanpur. We worked on this from October 2014 to March 2015.
The 2 bots designed were capable of serving the shuttle cock across the net to land in a specific region designated as a ‘successful serve’ by the organisers. They also had mechanisms to return the serve of the opposing team using different placements of badminton racquets. The image shows one of our robots that had a double pneumatic actuation mechanism in the center alongwith 2 side racquets to return the shuttle.
I was a part of the electronics team, managing the power delivery to the different components of the bot. Also, to reduce the clutter of wires, I designed Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) of different components of the bot, eg. the motor driver, on Altium Designer and got them printed for use. I also had major contributions in designing the mechanism to serve the shuttlecock.
Prasang Gupta
Senior Associate, Emerging Technologies
My research interests include distributed robotics, mobile computing and programmable matter.