Students from Electronics and Robotics Club (ERC) secured 1st position in the Maze Explorer Event held at IIT Hyderabad on 23 February. There were six teams in the competition with only three of them managing to reach the destination cell. 

The competition was to design and implement a maze-solving robot capable of autonomously navigating through a given 3D maze constructed with rigid walls and open pathways. The robot had to reach a specified destination while avoiding obstacles in the shortest possible time. The competition consisted of two rounds, each with a different destination, and three runs per round. The scoring system was based on how close our bots reached the destination, with full points being awarded for successfully reaching the destination. There was also a penalty for hitting walls or repositioning the bot.

All the late and sleepless nights spent on 3D printing, building the algorithm, calibrating the components, testing the bot in a maze paid off when the team finally won first place at the event. The team faced many obstacles in building an obstacle-avoiding bot, and it took them countless hours  in trying to fix them. All the issues and bugs in the software were handled in a simulator, but the real challenge was integrating the same software into the hardware, which had many minute inconsistencies that the simulator conveniently ignored.

February 2025