BHUBANESWAR: A team of engineering students from Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan (SOA) University here put up a fine performance at the SAARC Nations Robotics Championship held in Mumbai recently. Technical students from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka competed for honours at the championship.
The event was organised by IIT-Mumbai on Sunday in which a four-member team from the Institute of Technical Education and Research (ITER), SOA’s faculty of engineering, participated.
One of the three teams from ITER, which earlier participated in TECHFEST-2012, a preliminary event held in Mumbai in January drawing around 250 teams from across the country, had figured among the top 12 to qualify for the SAARC championship. Apart from the ITER team, four teams each from Pakistan and Sri Lanka completed the SAARC championship line-up.
The ITER team, comprising Piyush Routray, Ghanshyam Bhutra, Subrat Rath and Sandeep Kumar Palo, all students of final year B.Tech, topped the pool of six teams with a timing of 64 seconds to complete a lap. Three teams from India, including the ITER team and one from Pakistan, topped their respective pools to enter the semifinals. The students from ITER, however, lost to the Pakistan team in the battle for a place in the final. It was for the first time that the ITER students were participating in a robotics competition where accelerometer control had to be used.