Lankan students come first in international robotic competition

Two teams from University of Moratuwa bagged first place for two events at this year's TechFest International Robot Competition held recently at IIT Bombay, India.

The competition was organized by Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, which is one of the top ranked universities in the world. Two teams from Sri Lanka, who participated under two categories, namely 'Micromouse' and 'Arthrobot', emerged victorious in their respective competitions.

The Micromouse title was won by the team led by Rameesha de Silva Weerasinghe (postgraduate student, UoM), together with Salinda Thennakoon (postgraduate student, UoM) and L. R. D. R. Karunathilaka (student, IESL).

The Arthrobot title was won by the team led by A.G. Prasanna Perera together with his team mates Champika Ranasinghe, Damith S Chathuranga and Lakshitha Dayasena, all final year students of Faculty of Engineering, University of Moratuwa, where Damith is from the Mechanical Engineering department and others are from the Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering department.

Altogether three teams represented Sri Lanka at this event. The third team led by Indunil Abayrathna (final year UG, UoM) competed under the Arthrobot category.

A micromouse is an autonomous self contained machine designed to find its way to the center of a maze in the shortest possible time. It has sensors to detect the maze walls and motors and wheels to drive it in the direction required.

As Rameesha said the maze was very complicated this year than in previous years. Very few of the micro mice managed to complete the maze and find the center.

An Arthrobot is a robot having legs. This differentiates these robots from conventional mobile robots driven by wheels. International competitors from Singapore, Denmark, U.A.E. were also invited to participate. But the SL robots managed to outrun all of them and bring the title to Sri Lanka.

Rameesha and his team also participated in the Arthrobot competition with an eight legged robot driven by DC motors. But unfortunately they had to withdraw from the competition as there robots got stuck due to technical malfunctions at the last minute of the competition.

These three teams were selected after wining the preliminary round for the event (Techfest i-Nexus round), which was held in Sri Lanka in parallel to 'Expose 2008, the annual technological exhibition organized by the Department of Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering, University of Moratuwa.