Guide: Dr. Somasekhara Rao Todeti, Assistant Professor, Mechanical Department, NITK

Duration: August 2018 – April 2019

Summary:

1. Project involved design and development of a rice transplanting mechanism which can be used in manual transplanters

2. Method followed strictly in line with research based product development - Lead user surveys, market studies, benchmarking and need identification was carried out and design parameters were derived.

3. Design process involved use of synthesis of mechanism theory, kinematic and dynamic analysis. It involved use of MATLAB and MATHEMATICA for simulation with CAD model designed in CATIA.

4. Prototype model of the deigned machine was built and tested for its functionality.

5. Novelty of the project involves the new rice transplanting mechanism suitable for manual rice transplanters.

Guide: Dr. Prosenjit Sen, Assistant Professor, Center for Nano Science and Engineering, IISc, Bangalore

Duration: May 2018 to July 2018

Summary:

1. Project involved the reviewing various techniques that could be used for heating lab on chip devices

2. Relatively popular method of using micro-heaters made form high thermal conductivity metals that could meet the temperature requirements was identified for initial experiments.

3. A detailed study was carried out for identifying the suitable metals to be used as micro-heaters, Gold and Platinum were chosen as metals material for micro-heaters.

4. Experiments were carried out in the to conduct the Thermal characterization of micro-heaters.

5. Based on the obtained data Temperature Coefficient of Resistance was identified.

6. This data collected was then used for development of plant model in order to design a controller simulation in Simulink environment.

Guide: Dr. K.V. Gangadharan – Professor, Mechanical Engineering Department

Team: Robotics Club NITK

Duration: June-2016 to May-2017

Learning Experience:

1. Project was funded by Daimler AG (India) with an aim to develop low cost AGVs.

2. Project included designing the prototype model for the AGV and demonstrate the load carrying functionality

3. We successfully built the working AGV prototype based on magnetic tape navigation, with maximum load carrying capacity of 200kg at cost of Rs.200000 ($ 3030).

4. My contribution in Mechanical design was of the Battery Chambers inside AGV, Trolley Design and Weight Distribution Analysis

5. I also worked on sensor calibration and motor control algorithm's design and scripting.

Lab: Center for System Design, NITK

Project Learning and Brief:

Smart City was the course project under Theory and Practice of Sensors and Actuators offered by Center for System Design. It was divide into various modules and different teams were allotted one module to work upon. I was part of 3 member team working on Path Planning problem.

1. It included the task of planning a paths for the two line following bots in the model city
2. Various algorithm were studied notably A-Star and Dijkstra for the path planning and shortest path identification purpose.
3. Various operational constraints were identified and accordingly the algorithm of Dijkstra was modified to fit the requirements.
4. Code was combined with the image processing code worked out by other team for location tracking of the bots.
5. Finally the integrated code was tested for two bot system and it worked smoothly.