What a robot!

Yesterday, I was lucky to get to watch a demo of Mrinal & Gang’s COMRADE Robot at Yahoo! They have been working on this since a long time and they were sponsored by Yahoo! during this semester as a project, under the guidance of Kalyan.

Oh, and how is the robot, you ask? It’s simply stupendous, brilliant, mind-blowing, breathtaking, … !!! Please apply all other synonyms as well! I was just numb for 45 minutes just amazed at it – the whole works – the hardware, the mechanical stuff, the software written for it.

When shown a path using a black ribbon tape, it can follow the path and move! It can even avoid obstacles using SONAR. They are now working on a module to generate maps on what COMRADE currently sees, it’ll be something like one of those virtual reality pics we all are crazy about. There is so much more in their TODO list.

Hats off to Mrinal, Jnaneshwar, Sharad and Avishek. Keep up the great work, guys!

(I took two snaps in my mobile phone camera. Hoping to put them up as soon as I get
a data cable…)