IIT-M unveils team for international competition

On Friday, the Centre for Innovation (CFI) team under the IIT unveiled the teams which would compete against college teams from all over the world. 

The teams include CFI’s Team Raftar, which has built from scratch a Formula One race car. They are the only Indian team to qualify for registration for Formula Student Germany 2018, in which students build a single-seat Formula One car with which they can compete against teams from all over the world. 

The team is among the 60 combustion teams to successfully register out of 173 teams from all over the world.

Another team, Anveshak, has built a Mars Rover which qualified for the finals of University Rover Challenge last year, and was demonstrated at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, US. The team has qualified this year as well.

Team Abhiyaan built a ground vehicle capable of navigating autonomously via GPS way-points. Last year, they qualified for ‘Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition,’ an annual international robotics event held at Oakland University, Michigan, US. It was one of the two teams from India which qualified for the event.

Bhaskar Ramamurthi, director, IIT Madras, said the academic year 2017-18 too has been very productive for CFI, like past years.

Competing against top engineering universities across the world, the internationally acclaimed student teams from CFI have consistently proven why IIT Madras is the best engineering institute in the country by bagging laurels at both national and international competitions over the years, Ramamurthi added.

The Centre For Innovation, a 24x7 ‘student lab’, was established in 2008 with funds donated by the batch of 1981. It was set up to encourage engineers to apply knowledge from their academic pursuits to innovate and propose solutions to real-world problems. 

CFI serves as a creative hub, encouraging peer learning and providing a platform for ideas to manifest with the support of resources, workspace and mentoring.