Indian student team shines at an international robotics competition in Singapore

New Delhi: A group of 12 Indian engineering students from Mukesh Patel School of Technology Management & Engineering, Vile Parle participated in a Singapore based competition during 5th-12th March. The Singapore Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Challenge (SAUVC, 2019) is an annual underwater robotics competition, where undergraduate teams from India, Russia, Indonesia, China, Malaysia, etc participate and compete with each other by performing several underwater tasks with the help of the robot.

Team AUV MPSTME was amongst 22 other teams from the same country, but they were the only Indian team that qualified for the finals of the competition. The team then competed against 14 other teams during the finale. In the final ranking, Team AUV MPSTME stood 7th out of a global pool of 61 teams. About the competition, Faculty Mentor Prof. Vinod Jain said “Students from various engineering backgrounds like Mechanical, Electronics, Computers, and especially Mechatronics are part of the team. The competition is truly interdisciplinary since it requires the best inputs from each of these engineering fields.”

Team AUV MPSTME also bagged the “Social Media Prize” by mass sharing one of their photographs on Instagram. This one photo garnered over 46,000 likes in a single day. About the award, Faculty Mentor Prof. Kashyap Joshi said: “It is a prize of USD 200, which would be spent towards the purchase of better equipment such as thrusters and sensors for the vehicle.”

The team is looking forward to participating at other such competitions at a larger and tougher scale. “We’re planning to compete at the RoboSub competition in the USA, in July”, said team captain.