Project Manas
Project MANAS is Manipal’s official AI Robotics undergraduate research project comprising of a 55 member strong team, spanning multiple branches of engineering. The project engages several artificial intelligence and robotics projects such as robotic arm, autonomous Hexapod, Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) and many such exciting & innovative projects. Currently the team’s primary objective is to build a Driverless Car specifically adapted to the Indian conditions.
The team took birth in 2014 with the advent of Mahindra’s 1 million dollar, “Spark The Rise” Driverless Car Challenge, challenging innovative minds to efficiently engineer an autonomous vehicle to drive through the Indian roads! The team progressed through the initial qualifying rounds and made a huge stride with their prototype, a semi-autonomous robot which aesthetically represented the robot Wall –E and was thereby named after it. Subjected to hard work and dedication, the team emerged among the top 13 of 259 teams and became the only undergraduate team to have come this far!
The team has come a long way since then. It has broadened its goals from building a driverless car to exploring the scope of AI robotics and implementing real world applications. The Team is also set to go global at the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (IGVC) 2018 held in Michigan, USA.
Mission:
● Excellence in the field of AI Robotics
● Establishment of a state-of-the-art AI Robotics research centre in India.
● Upliftment of the student community by creating fully capable all-round individuals with a diverse set of skills in the fields of technology, research and management.
● Contribution to the Open Source community by helping with testing of different components of the libraries and also updating their code base to fix bugs.
Achievements:
● Secured a position in the final round of Mahindra’s one million dollar “Spark the Rise” driverless car challenge. The only undergraduate team from a private university to make it this far.
● Secured 1st Place in Philips Hackabout Competition 2016
● Secured 1st Place in FlyNava Codeathon 2016
● Acquired major sponsorship from industrial giants including Microsoft, Continental, Nvidia, National Instruments, Vector, Sick & many more in a span of just 8 months.
● Acquired mentorship from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab & Continental.
Faculty Mentors:
Faculty Advisor : Ashalatha Nayak, Professor & Head Of Department, Department Of Computer Science & Engineering
Faculty Mentor : Mukund Kumar Menon, Assistant Professor (Sr. Scale), Department of Instrumentation & Control Engineering
Website : http://projectmanas.in/
Follow us on Facebook: /projectmanas
