City BE students bag NIOT gold

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Five students sponsored by the Panimalar Institute of Technology(PIT), Chennai bagged the national-level competition on student autonomous underwater vehicle (SAVe-2012) organised by the National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) here on Monday. A team from IIT Kharagpur finished second.

The winning team comprised of three final year electrical and electronics engineering students from PIT —- Anand Sundaresan, Rajesh Ravindran and Sarouj Charan —- and two other college students, S. V. Koushik, a final year computer science student from S. M. K. Fomra Institute of Technology and Prasanna Balasubramaniam, a final year mechanical engineering student from SSN Engineering College.

“We will sponsor the winners to participate in an international competition that will be held at San Diego, USA during July 2012,’ said Dr M. A. Atmanand, director, NIOT. He added that a NIOT scientist would help the team fine-tune their project with technical inputs.

The PIT sponsored five member-team have build an autonomous underwater vehicle that would be completely submersible. Named Vyuha, the vehicle has the capacity to go inside water and can navigate on it’s own.

“It is built with complete intelligence and it doesn’t need any instructions,” said Mr Anand, adding that the vehicle was like a miniature submarine without any human beings inside. According to the team members, the management of the Panimalar Institute of Technology has sponsored `4 lakh to develop the prototype.

The winners came out triumph from a series of selection trials including submission of idea, creating a conceptual design, strategies and finally, the prototype. In all 57 team registered for the competition with 17 teams submitting their preliminary design reports. Based on methodology adopted and ability to define their ideas, eight teams were selected for the final.