Kerala engg college students to compete in designing rover for Mars mission

The University Rover Challenge is the world's premier robotics competition for college students.

This is the first time students from an engineering institute from the state have been selected for competing in the University Rover Challenge (URC) in the US to design and build the next generation of Mars rovers that would work alongside human explorers in the field.

Apart from the URC 2014,  the five-member team from TIST at Arakkunam, near here, will also compete with students from the globe in the prestigious international aeronautical contest - CanSat - in the US. The purpose of the CanSat is to mimic the functions of an actual satellite, and thus it is an intertwining of various fields of engineering.

While the CanSat competition will be held in Texas in June, the URC will be held at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in the remote-barren desert of southern Utah in May 2014.

The URC is the world's premier robotics competition for college students.

TIST is among 31 university teams in the URC representing six countries-the US, India, Egypt, Poland, Canada and Bangladesh; and the team will compete with students from institutions including Yale University, Cornell University and the Warsaw University of Technology.

It is for the second consecutive year that a team from TIST has been selected for the CanSat, which is being organised by the American Astronautical Society (AAS) and American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), in association with the Nasa, Naval Research Laboratory (USA), Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp and Praxis Inc.

"We are the only college from the Kerala participating in the contest. The participating team comprising of five members has been named Chronos. The team will exhibit their academic, technical and managerial skills at the competition," said TIST director V Job Kuruvilla. 

The members of the Chronos are Anoop Nayak, PV Abimanyu Nair, Muhammed Juhaim Ibnu Abdul Jabbar, Jibin Jose and Joseph Stephen. The team's faculty advisors are Kiran George Varghese and Shajan K Thomas.

Both Juhaim and Jibin Jose have their own ventures at the government-backed Startup Village technology business incubator set up to promote young IT entrepreneurs.

The mission this year is to simulate the delivery of a sensor payload to a planet's surface. Students will design a system consisting of a two primary components - the payload (a large egg) and a re-entry container to protect it. It will be deployed from the rocket, the payload will be released from the container and land safely with the sensor (egg) intact. All operations will be autonomously done by the CanSat. The URC was launched in 2006, with competitions being held every summer since 2007.  The URC consistently draws an international field of the most talented and promising students from around the globe.