TEAM RUDRA - SRM Mars Rover

Team RUDRA is the official Mars Rover Team of SRM IST (Chennai, TN, India), taking part in University Rover Challenge organized by Mars Society since 2013. The annual competition is held at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS), Martian Analog Site, near Hanksville, Utah, USA. The team has been successfully operational for the last 7 years and has maintained its consistency in the competition. Our Team consists of 25-30 undergraduate students of every year from various engineering streams, working in different domains. The fun part - R&D, is the soul and essence of Team RUDRA. Brainstorming discussions are always welcome for giving birth to new ideas.

Our motto at Team RUDRA is to INNOVATE, BUILD, DESIGN and REPEAT the same process every year. Due to this, our team has catered to the budding engineers from our institution to gain an immense amount of technical and practical knowledge. This is the sole aspect of our team, i.e. research and development. The main idea behind starting this team towards this specific competition is to gain exposure in the fields of robotics and astral vehicles. I could proudly say that our experience with this team has helped each and every member to develop an intellectual personality that is driven through professional and technical expertise.

Our rover is designed and built adhering to the problem statement released by the University Rover Challenge every year. The mechanical body is designed to house the onboard electronics and site analysis materials at the same time maintaining a robust structure to tackle the Martian terrain. The onboard electronics are responsible for powering the drive, the arm and all the required communication equipment. The main controller onboard is the NVidia TX2 in combination with STM 32. All the components are integrated using the Robot Operating System (ROS). The rover is controlled remotely from a ground station. An interactive Graphical User Interface (GUI) has been developed in house to give ease of control while maintaining the efficiency of the rover. The rover also has autonomous capability in which it is programmed to traverse between two GPS coordinates on its own. It performs obstacle avoidance using a 3D depth-sensing stereo camera, which is also used to detect objects at the competition site.

Our team also believes in giving back to the society through our expertise that we have gained through the team. This belief has motivated our team to take up a few projects every year to solve the real world problems and also to make innovations in the field of robotics. Innovation is what every industry is aiming in era. We are also no different than the others, i.e. we are also constantly striving towards innovation. Innovation mainly occurs where there is a necessity to do things differently, therefore our team always looks things from different perspective which lead us to create new mechanisms and techniques.

We have been performing consistently over the years, which not only lead us to gain experience and exposure but also allowed us to build a community of robotics enthusiasts in and around our college. We share ideas and also help each other in the time of need.