Two – Day Workshop on Introduction to Robotics by e-Yantra Lab Setup Initiative (eLSI), IIT Bombay

The Department of Electronics & Telecommunication of Don Bosco College of Engineering in association with e-Yantra Lab Setup Initiative (eLSI), IIT Bombay organized a Two Day Workshop on Introduction to Robotics for the teaching faculty in Goa and other neighboring states. Around 56 participants from 14 colleges participated in the workshop from Goa, Karnataka, Maharsthtra and Andhra Pradesh. e-Yantra Lab Setup Initiative is a flagship project of MHRD through the National Mission on Education through ICT project in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), IIT Bombay to spread embedded systems and Robotics education in colleges across India.

At the inauguration, Prinicpal, Dr. Neena Panandikar welcomed everyone and in her message urged the participants to take maximum advantage and to get the doubts clarified and spread this knowledge to your respective institutes. Director, Fr. Kinley D’Cruz addressed all the participants and stated that this workshop provides a very good platform to take off in our career. The Overview of e-Yantra was through a live web session by Dr. Krishna Lala, Senior Project Manager, Core Team, e-Yantra. It has a only project with a  strong hands on component that involves learning. It has three stakeholders – students, teachers and colleges. There is a student’s robotics competition where a theme has to be implemented based on what has been taught. Three mantras of eYantra are Scalability, Sustainability and Accountability. Numerous sessions were conducted on Introduction to Robotics that included Major Components such as Sensors, Actuators, Control, Intelligence, Power, Communication, Indicating Devices of a Robot, Introduction to Firebird ATmega, First Embedded C program on Buzzer interfacing, Basic Movements of Robot and Motor Driver IC L293D, Motor Interfacing on Firebird, Robot Movements and interfacing of LCD to Firebird and displaying a message on it.

Day Two – Workshop

Day two sessions started with the introduction of various timers/counters and the Pulse Width Modulation technique used to control the velocity of the motor was discussed. The same technique was implemented using Fast PWM mode to control the speed of dc motors of Firebird V. The second session included overview on ADC of ATmega 2560 and its channels, followed by ADC Programming. The third session covered Interrupts, Sources of Interrupts and Interrupt-Handling on Firebird. All the sessions were hands on session, wherein each of the team programmed the Firebird robot provided to them.