e-Yantra Robotics Competition 2013 at IIT Bombay

Prof. Kavi Arya and Prof. Krithi Ramamritham at the launch of e-Yantra 2013

Mumbai: With the Indian economy in tatters on country’s 66th birth anniversary, growth seems to be in trouble. On one hand, the Rupee has lost its sheen and continues to dive down South at a scary pace; on the other hand, the vegetable prices are effortlessly soaring up North. Alarm bells haven’t stopped ringing for quite a while. While the policy makers may fight debate endlessly and show a fuzziness that is difficult to comprehend, much less appreciate, the need to focus on the relevance of the issue of hunger has never been more urgent than it is today.

World over, Urban Farming has been slowly gathering momentum. Closer to home, our rapidly urbanizing population of over 1.2 billion give us challenges in both food production and distribution. For instance, onions, a staple in Indian diets, have touched Rs. 80 a kilo. How can an average urban family afford vegetables in this situation? Can engineers help solve problems by encouraging Urban Farming?

e-Yantra an MHRD sponsored project under the National Mission on Education through ICT (NMEICT), every year chooses relevant and visible problems that need immediate attention and solution as its theme for its national robotics competition. Young engineering students from across the country use robotics as a tool to find solutions to these problems. Last year it looked at poor road conditions and potholes. This year, keeping the current scenario in mind, e-Yantra 2013 will bring these talented, engineering youths of the country to use robotics to develop indigenous solutions in the field of Urban Agriculture. The objective of the competition is to bring awareness to problems in the Agriculture domain by assigning themes that involve processes in this domain.

Winners of last year's e-Yanra 2012 now interning at the e-Yantra lab at IIT Bombay

Four themes suggested as exemplars of important stages in the agriculture production life cycle are:

• Seeding
• Fertilizing
• Weeding
• Harvesting

Student teams from around the country will work on prototypes of robots such as the seed-sowing robot, fertilizing robot, weeding robot, and harvesting robot.

The aim of the competition this year is to bring awareness to students about the many problems that a farmer faces and how technology may be used to provide solutions to these problems. In the process of creating the prototypes, students learn concepts of Embedded systems, Micro-controller programming and hone their communication skills.

“It has been shown that covered cultivation (greenhouses) can double or triple the yield of vegetables - even allowing us to grow veggies off-season. (cultivation in controlled environments have shown increased yields of produce) When we want to maximise yield in such environments, automation helps us tend the environment and improve yields. For instance, many of the processes in strawberry cultivation abroad, including harvesting of ripe fruit, are automated. Typically this technology is at the early innovation stage in developing countries and it is expensive. There is perhaps a lot that Indian ingenuity might bring to this important domain in future.” said Prof Kavi Arya.

Accordingly, engineering students from across the country will be encouraged to adapt given robots, to tackle four aspects of “covered agriculture”, including seeding, weeding, fertilising and harvesting. Each group of students will program an existing robotic platform to address each of these aspects during a 12-week duration.

“In a growing economy, cheap skilled labour is a myth. Transporting vegetables over long distances amid rising cost of diesel is another cause behind rising costs of vegetables. The time is ripe for urban farming, high-intensity cultivation and for automation to help bring down the cost of food in our cities. If we can grow vegetables locally using automation, it will help bring (cheaper and fresher produce to your kitchen and your tables) and lower costs to a large extent. We hope that engineering students, once stimulated in this manner, will begin to address the larger problems and be the source of innovative technology that the country needs to produce high quality, low cost produce to feed its rapidly growing population” he added.

Prof. Krithi Ramamritham said, ‘The progress of our nation lies in producing high quality (employable) engineers with the education and adequate exposure to technology and the appropriate skill set at a young age to think innovatively and develop indigenous cost-effective solutions. I am sure that the confidence boost provided by participating in the e-Yantra competition will empower young engineers to step forward to address the challenging problems that we face everyday."

For further information, please contact: Atul Malikram atul@atulmalikram.in

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IIT Bombay launches e-Yantra Lab Set-up Initiative

Mumbai, April 05, 2013: IT Bombay today announced the launch of its e-Yantra Lab Set-up Initiative (eLSI) – a nationwide vision to enable and empower engineering education in the country through creating facilities and producing mentors. A logical next step to providing scalability and sustainability to the pan-India e-Yantra Robotics Competition for students launched in July last year, e-Yantra Lab Set-up Initiative will create the infrastructure for students to engage their interest in Robotics and Embedded systems in a continuing manner. E-Yantra is an MHRD sponsored project under the National Mission for Education in ICT (NMEICT) program.

‘We do this by setting up e-Yantra labs, training teachers and getting them to integrate our "learn by doing" ideas into the curriculum. Once the labs are in place we can share our know-how, teaching insights, project methodologies, etc. ultimately to train the teachers to take ownership of our Embedded Systems course,’ says Prof. Kavi Arya of the Computer Science and Engineering department of IIT Bombay and one of the conceptualisers of e-Yantra.

(L to R) Prof. Kavi Arya, Dr. Seema Shah, Prof Srikant Velankar, Prof. Krithi Ramamritham.jpg

In the pilot phase, e-Yantra conducted workshops where teams of 4 teachers from the shortlisted 16 engineering colleges in the Mumbai region were trained in the theory of micro-controllers and programming of Robots. To give them a hands on experience, these 16 teams participated in the e-Yantra Robotics Teacher Competition - a competition over a period of 4 months to train them in all aspects of a technology project. The finale of this teachers' competition also coincided with today’s launch of eLSI as a symbol of preparedness of the teachers to assign projects to their students in the newly launched Robotics labs.

Today’s launch event took place at the Vidyalankar Institute of Technology, Wadala - one of the 16 participating colleges from Mumbai. The entire team of teachers and principals from the remaining 15 colleges were present at the launch along with the team from IIT Bombay including Prof. Krithi Ramamritham, Prof. Kavi Arya and also Dr. Rajan Welukar Vice Chancellor of Mumbai University who joined in through a video link to address the audience.


By the end of first year, IIT Bombay aims to create e-Yantra labs across 100 colleges and 5 Nodal Centers (each Nodal Center (NC) to oversee around 20 colleges). By the end of 3rd year this number would go up to 500 colleges and 25 NCs in all the small and large towns, villages and cities of the country.

A couple of weeks ago IIT Bombay’s e-Yantra concluded its first National Robotics Competition grand finale. First a phenomenon and then a rage among engineering students from across the nation; it led to 6000 registrations (from some of the remotest parts of the country), 500 participants, 25% female participants, 131 teams, 20 finalist teams and all winners.

While that created awareness and identified a need, in order to sustain the generated impact on the engineering curriculum in future, it was essential to create a supporting infrastructure that enables and empowers. An infrastructure that brings students and teachers together to work on innovative and meaningful projects and solves problems, which are unique to our country and environment.

Prof. Suresh Ukarande, Dean of Faculty of Technology, University of Mumbai who enthusiastically put Mumbai University behind this initiative and piloted and supported the e-Yantra Lab Setup Initiative said, ‘through Robotics, we want to create a culture of practical knowledge, research and creative and innovative thinking among students’.

‘What makes e-Yantra special is its inter-disciplinary approach. This results students across departments – be it electrical, mechanical, computer science – to come together to solve an existing tangible problem and create something that is beyond their defined syllabus. The e-Yantra Lab Setup Initiative is a visionary concept that only an institute of the stature of IIT Bombay can think of and see through. I wish them all the best,’ he added.

Speaking on the occasion, Prof. Krithi Ramamritham also from the CSE department and co-conceptualiser of e-Yantra said, ‘our goal is to help develop core engineering skills in our students to inspire them to look upon themselves as “problem solvers for society.” To stimulate their creativity and analytical skills and to “learn by doing.” This practical approach is sadly lacking in Indian education’.

‘We believe e-Yantra will play a significant role in addressing a number of the pressing issues in our education system at the college level. We need to scale up the program as fast as possible to create useful skills in the students. This means not only technology development but to nurture a market driven eco-system that will sustain the new infrastructure being created of robots and ancillary equipment in the academic community. This being our goal, we have certainly made a promising start and the story promises to get more exciting as we reach out to the rest of the country to colour it in different hues of e-Yantra,’ added Prof. Arya.

Commenting on the launch, Dr. Seema Shah, Acting Principal of Vidyalankar Institute of Technology said, ‘We at Vidyalankar Institute of Technology are extremely proud to be a part of the e-Yantra MHRD pilot project. Under the able guidance of the capable e-Yantra team from IIT Bombay, all the 16 colleges in Mumbai will definitely take this project to greater heights. This is just the start of a productive relationship among us all in the field of Robotics. The success of the pilot initiative will enable the e-Yantra team to extend this project to the other engineering colleges across the country’.

The IIT Bombay e-Yantra team has devised a simple, scalable and sustainable model for setting up labs in colleges across India. Colleges with strong networking and infrastructure capabilities in different regions are identified as Nodal Centers (NCs) each of which will serve as a coordinating and mentoring entity for 20-30 colleges from that region. All that the participating college needs to do is make an investment of Rs. 5 lakh to purchase robots, tools and ancillary equipment, have a dedicated team of 4 teachers (to be trained by IIT Bombay), physical space for the e-Yantra lab and 20 PCs/laptops to be made available to the students.

Once the infrastructure and willingness is in place, IIT Bombay steps in with its 3-pronged approach of setting up the e-Yantra labs that most teachers and colleges have found motivating and rewarding:

- Mentors: delivering mentors by training teachers through workshops on Robotics and Embedded systems

- Infrastructure: helping in infrastructure set up with its expertise and knowledge of setting up and running a Robotics lab

- Competition: leading the teachers through their participation in a teachers' version of the contest to show how to handle a project.

Every college has the responsibility to create and sustain the interest of students in their engineering subjects. e-Yantra does this by making teaching exciting and demonstrating the societal problem-solving angle at every stage. A college gains highly motivated students and teachers and a relevant curriculum. It gains visibility amongst students. It creates students with the practical systems engineering outlook much more desirable to industry and the community. It creates value all round for all stakeholders.

By plugging the college into the IIT Bombay eco-system of projects and project ideas, e-Yantra’s intention and goal is to give each college a start such that over a period of time they also help create content for the robotic eco-system with a multiplicative effect on intellectual property creation.


For further information, please contact:
Atul Malikram
9827092823

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