A six-member team of students from the Departments of Automation and Robotics and Mechanical Engineering of KLE Technological University has emerged joint winner in the hardware edition of Smart India Hackathon 2020.
According to a press note by KLE Technological University, the team was led by Poornaditya Mishra and comprised Prithvi Deshpande, Alwin M. Reji, Haripriya Jagadeesh of Automation and Robotics, and Swaroop Shenoy and Goutam Muralidhar of Mechanical Engineering. They were guided by Head of the Department of Automation and Robotics, Arun Giriyapur.
The team had selected the problem statement ‘fire safe infrastructure for construction industry’ given by Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. The given problem was designing a hardware device that could withstand fire and move inside the place on fire, and should be remotely controlled. The challenge was that the design should be in such a way as to help identify survivors and also douse fire near them.
The team proposed a robot as a solution, which would be operated remotely. The robot is incorporated with a main processing unit, cameras [one normal and one infrared] and houses two fire extinguishing mechanisms.
The primary mechanism is a spring-based launcher mechanism that launches fire extinguisher balls. These balls are excellent at clearing out rooms in a short time and can greatly assist rescue operations where speed and efficiency are paramount.
The secondary mechanism is a traditional spray-based fire extinguisher, which is actuated by cam mechanism, the release said.
SIH 2020 involved six stages of process flow. The process started in January 2020 and the students underwent various stages of clearance before being finally adjudged as joint winners of SIH2020 in February 2021.
Expressing happiness over achievement, Head of the Department of Automation and Robotics of KLETU, Arun Giriyapur, said that such competitions helped students to think out of the box and come up innovative solutions for real problems.
