Inspiration from nature and hackneyed parking problem in the city have driven a team of mechanical engineering students to design a futuristic, transformable vehicle that can contract and retract.
University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering (UVCE) students Vaisakh R (V semester), Arjun Premchandran and C Keerthivash (VII semester) have rendered Project Macro, which bagged the Sustainable Award at the recently-concluded national-level Autodesk Inventor Student Design Competition 2012, organized by the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and National Skill Development Corporation.
Mentored by Associate Professor, C K Umesh, the team derived the idea by bio-mimicking a caterpillar’s neck that contracts and retracts. Vaisakh’s team spent three months rendering the design of this sustainable car on Autodesk, a 3D design software, for manufacturing and engineering.
“In our rendering, there is an auxiliary motor under the seat of the car. When the motor runs, the back portion of the car moves forward just like a caterpillar’s neck, reducing the total length of the car from 2 meters to 1.4 meters. We believe this will be beneficial during parking vehicles in a city like Bangalore,” Vaisakh says.
With this mechanism, the two rear tyres move closer to the front tyre with the help of a hydraulics system and the car’s length reduces significantly.
The car, which runs on electric power, can accommodate one driver in the front and two passengers at the back, while in transit. The UVCE team competed with more than 1,000 teams from all across the country and won `50,000 cash prize along with state-of-the-art SpaceMouse Pro (3D mouse).