Memories from the Shaastra Victory.

For technical details of maze solving algorithm, please find my half written book here.

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If anyone ever asks me whether I have seen real magic, my answer would be “Yes!”. It was Shaastra 2017. The week of Shaastra was very special for all of us. It was a period of hard work, persistence, courage which brought out the hidden engineering skills in us. We stood first in the competition beating all other teams by huge margins. In Harsha Bhogle’s words, they were “beaten by yards, stumped by inches!”.

We decided to participate in this competition for fun and filled the form pretty casually. It was the eve of Christmas when I reached my hostel one week early just to find out Saket, Aditya and Ganatma playing around with a bot. The competition was to be held on 1st of January and we had barely a week to go. With a 3D printed chassis, everyone was trying to configure left, right and U turns for line following bot. Two days past, it was 27th, we did not move. Fixing one turn would disturb the other and the bot was unable to turn correctly. We tried harder, finally resorting to styroform sheets to build a new chassis. It too failed miserably. The flaw was with motors, the left wheel rotated faster than the right and could not be fixed.

Having made 3-4 attempts, I decided to buy every part afresh and build a new bot altogether. The shop was 120 kms away in the city of Chennai. Without consulting the team, I took a train, traveled 3hrs and 3hrs back. We had all materials now, new and afresh, all set to make a new bot. But time was running out. We were to build the bot, configure all sensors & finally the toughest part of all: write an algorithm for maze solving. We had 3 days and one goal.

We took to building the bot again, divided the tasks, configured the turns. We had no hostel-mess to eat breakfast, neither lunch nor dinner. Time was miserable and I fell ill. With 4 days of outside food, I caught severe stomach ache. While everyone continued, I took to bed for a day. We had one day to go. The bot was not fully ready though. We had some potential problems with IR sensor though we fixed the turns correctly. Saket took to writing the algorithm while Ganatma designed a covering for the bot. The Arduino mini got burned, Aditya took to shop and quickly bought a new Arduino Mega. The bot looked like this:

It was 9 pm, last day of the year, we had to leave early morning for the competition. The algorithm wasn’t optimal though it solved the maze correctly. We were half ready for round 1 of the competition, did not at all prepare for round 2. Having come this far, we continued to work over night, we worked till 4 am in the morning, finally taking a bus for the same 3hrs journey. Fast forward with the half ready bot, we stepped into the preliminary round. It was a total mess. The bot missed junctions, remembered nothing, took mindless turns and what not. Saket and Aditya gave up, left the bot in the arena and went to watch other competitions in the festival. Me and Ganatma stayed with in the arena somehow managed to clear the prelims. Tricking the judges, I kept placing the misalsigned bot in a way to skip junctions which led to misalginment. We weren’t cheating, we just had no other way.

Saket was upset with the loss. All hard work seemed to go in vain. We still didn’t give up. The same evening we bought white sheets, stuck black tapes, and started training our bot again. It failed. We tried again and again. Disappointed, we went stepped into the competition the next day. The best was yet to come. Our name was announced. We weren’t ready, we could not ask for more time. Saket held the laptop with me beside him. The mock trial didn’t work. The first turn itself was going wrong. I urged Saket to rethink for the one last time. He felt something was not initialized correctly, reinitializing one variable we stepped into the final round without a test run.

Due to non availability of one continuous large board, the designers had used two equal sized board pieces to design the maze. This left a small gap at the joint and all bots trying to cross over from one board to other failed at the joint due to detection errors by the sensors. All our mock trails failed. It was final round. The bot started, crossed the joint, no errors, went smoothly like nothing happened, explored the maze and discovered the target. It was round two. The bot started, crossed the joint, reached the target via the shortest path, zero penalties, no detection errors. We had won. It was magic.

Yes it was magic. We failed until the last moment and we won. We had completed the final maze in less than half the time taken by all other teams with no penalties at all. It was the most memorable day of my life.

All that I have to show you, is our pic after winning the competition!