Robotics Club Why it exists?

The whitewashed room in Hall of Residence- II, equipped with big machines and conference tables, was designed a long time ago to cater to the needs of tinkering minds in the Institute. A lot of efforts by the students and alumni have gone into ensuring that this room, which belongs to the Robotics Club, would be a place where people would come together to explore new projects and test their ideas. Such is the motto of the Science and Technology Council as well, of which the club has been a part of its existence.

Robotics Club became a name I began to closely associate myself with when I started working on the project Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) in my freshman year. Compared to the other ongoing projects at that time such as SAE and RoboCon, it was the lesser sibling in terms of how developed the project was, however the opportunity to work with like minded people is what drew me to this project. After spending close to three years on it, working with the team has been one of the greatest experiences for me in the Institute. The final working system Varun, maturing from an initial sketch on a piece of paper, marks a journey of tenacity and grit.

Similar to many freshmen who want to work on a project, one of the toughest decisions is to decide what you want to work on. In the plethora of options that were available to me at the start, I eventually decided to work on the mechanical aspects of the project because I felt I was more adept at such a work. With time and experience, I was able to mature upon what I really wanted to work in on a long- run. A suggestion: If one is to make a rough choice on what appeals to him or her, instead of blindly following the crowd a better approach is the one based on intuition. Ask yourself, “If I have to solve a particular problem, would I try to resolve it at the software end or at the hardware end?” With the answer to this itself, you should have your options reduced by half and things should become a bit clearer for you. However, this is just to help in making an initial decision quickly and allow you to start working on a project instead of wasting your time procrastinating. What is most important is that you develop the right attitude, and admit a sense of responsibility and enjoyment in the work you are doing, because eventually, everything else falls into the picture rightly.

Besides the opportunity to develop technical skills, the way the club runs and the kind of ecology that is present helps you in enhancing your soft skills. One of the now-graduated seniors once told me, “I would always be a great team player but I would need to work hard to become a good leader.” He was right to a large extent. The initial time, when the responsibility to lead the AUV team was passed on to me, I was all over the place trying to manage my own priorities and a team that had expanded its numbers. It took a while but thanks to the constant feedback I received from my seniors and my teammates, we managed to pull out of the mess that had been created. Experiences like these are only possible when you are working on a large project and are in it for a long time. You learn to collaborate on projects and value people for their ideas irrespective of how absurd they may sound. Robotics, as it is now seen as, is a demanding inter-disciplinary field and requires one to know about various aspects of mechanical, electronics, and software engineering; even patiently listening to other person’s problems help you widen your understanding of their field, and certainly engraves a deeper respect to the challenges in engineering.

Quoting an excerpt from Steve Jobs’s commencement speech at Stanford University, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” His words succinctly describe how I feel about this journey right now. What distinguishes working on projects in the club from the kind of exposure you get while working on a project with a professor is the level of maturity and independence you gain, and the kind of connections you get to make. One thing that I have realized as a member of the club is that most of the people who join in the projects are the go-getters in life, that is they end up pursuing something different from the crowd. To a large extent, I feel that the club helps in ensuring this difference and working with such people always bring a lot of humility and gratification. The club essentially serves as a platform to create bonds- with professors, seniors, your batchmates, and your juniors- that you would surely recognize once you graduate from the Institute.

The project AUV, which started off small, has grown over the years, just like the many long-term projects that are there in the club right now. It takes a few years to do that but in the end, it is all worth it. Thus, if you have a certain idea that you want to work on, then all you need is honest perseverance and the will to want to try it out relentlessly. You may always feel free to contact the club members to discuss it; in fact most people associated with the club love having an intellectual decisions on an idea and such discussions are, in general, encouraged provided you have done a bit of ‘research’ on your own before wanting to jump onto the implementing stage impulsively. It is always easy to start working on a project on anything but the enriching journey from a raw idea to an end- product is what working in the club is all about. I hope that the club becomes a home to its new members as it has been for me for all my stay at the Institute.