It’s risky business for marine engineers who have to dive under water to carry out inspections and repairs of bridges, ships’ hulls and pipelines. Hoping to eliminate that risk with their invention is a group of undergraduate students at IIT Madras, who have developed a prototype of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) called Amogh that can dive 10-15 metre underwater and perform these tasks.
It is one of the projects that have come up at the Centre for Innovation, IIT-M. “The project was started in 2012 with a vision to be self-sufficient in underwater technologies,” says Sanchit Gupta, a fourth-year Naval Architecture student of IIT-M.
The 21-member team includes Sibi George, Lalam Rithish, Shameem Shereef, Naval Tharun, H Tejdeep Reddy and Abdul Wariz from Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering; Varun Gupta, Pavana Siddhartha, Siva CH and K Narayan Pai from Mechanical Engineering; Ashutosh Singh and Koundinya Poluri from Aerospace Engineering; Aayush Maloo and Y Tarun Kumar from Engineering Design; Sravantha Pujari, Jayachand M and SK Bharath from Electrical Engineering; Suvindu CH from Chemical Engineering; HS Sunil Simha from the Physics department and Mohnish SP from Computer Science. Vineet Upadhyay, a recent graduate and former team leader of Amogh, who was present during the conceptualisation stage says that Robotics had become a craze when he was in college. “Robotics went well with AUVs and ROVs (Remotely Operated Underwater Vehicles). Marine Robotics was the buzzword then. Besides, human divers with their cameras cannot provide ultrasonic scans of underwater objects that AUVs can. That is when we decided to pitch the idea to IIT’s Centre for Innovation and work on Amogh started,” he says. Sanchit also points out that when underwater inspections are done using ROVs, it is difficult to reach uncharted areas.
Over the years, the team has developed three different prototype versions, Amogh 2.0 being the latest. “Every version had its capabilities upgraded. The main objective is to perform various shallow water applications. It weighs 34.5 kg and has an endurance time of 120 minutes,” says Sanchit, adding that the merits of the vehicle are its hydrodynamics, the modular frame and its compact wiring.
The team won the National Institute of Ocean Technology’s Student Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition (SAVe) in 2014 and represented India in AUVSI RoboSub competition in San Diego, US. They were placed in the top 15 among 40 teams there. In Power of Shunya: Challenge for Zero competition organised by ET Now news channel they were in the top 24. CII’s India Innovation Initiative placed them in the top 44. The team is currently gearing up for RoboSub 2015, a competition held by the.Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI).
suraksha@newindianexpress.com