International Exhibitions @ IIT Bombay Techfest 2010

If the internal IITB exhibitions rocked this year the international exhibitions were no less and pretty much upto the mark compared to the previous versions. There were many innovative and advanced technologies at display (read James Bond style technology if that helps your imagination). Ranging from nanobots to underwater robots (fishes and lobsters), from 3-D simulations of earthquakes to amazing solar powered racing cars, this year had it all.

Gwawr – The solar car

This beautiful welsh named car Gwawr meaning dawn was one of the attractions of the international exhibitions at the Techfest @IITB this year. Also a winner of the Panasonic World Solar Challenge Environmental Awareness Award 2007 not only because it runs on green fuel but also due to the fact that most of it is made from recycled materials resulting in almost zero carbon emissions when when the car is scrapped.

The car at display wasn’t the original one, but a scaled down model which was powered by electricity for now. Prof. Graham and Tom built it in 9 days for the exhibition. The actual car is a dual powered one which can be charged via both, Yeah! you guessed it, electricity and solar power. The scaled down model at the exhibition could do 25mph (because it had got Prof. Graham’s bicycle motor attached to it). The braking system was also adopted from the bicycle itself. While onlygizmos was lucky enough to get an exclusive video of Tom (future Schumacher for his sheer driving skills) driving the car. I was even more luckier to get a chance to get into the car.

Quantum of solace

As the name suggests this was indeed an amazingly sophisticated display of state of the art technology straight out of the Bond flick. Here on display were nano cars (and we are not referring to the Tata ones). These were very small minute cars which used advanced solar panels to generate energy to run these cars.

They also displayed other cool gadgets which used the solar energy to generate power.

Robotis

This was an interesting display by a Korean company. On display were two different kind of educational bots. First one called the Ollobot. These were small robots costing around Rs. 1500. These robots are used to learn basics of robotics. Like learning to program the robot to walk or run in a specified area and other such tasks.

Now for more advanced learning is the kit called Bioloid. These are different but very advanced bots some of which are bipedal (called Humanoid) and animals (called puppy) etc and can perform various complex tasks like dancing,playing games etc. The kit costs around Rs. 40,000. Interestingly these robots also respond to sounds in the form of claps.

Besides education these are obviously used for pure entertainment as well. I know we are at the Techfest. But still the sophisticated abilities of these small robots amazes me. Geez!

...more