Innovations by IIT & BITS Pilani students

Engineering students are known to be the brain behind all the modern day innovations such as electricity, air conditioning, computers and the likes which today we are accustomed to use and without which our lives seem almost incomplete.

We all know that innovative ideas are what set students from institutes like IIT and BITS Pilani apart from their peers. Both these institutes are known to nurture talent and the same can be witnessed by the incredible innovations that students from these institutes manifest.

Here, are some innovative ideas which were the brainchild of engineers who graduated from IIT and BITS Pilani.

ThinkLABS

Innovators: Gagan Goyal & Gaurav Chaturvedi

Institute: IIT Bombay

Gagan Goyal, a mechanical engineering graduate from IIT Bombay and Gaurav Chaturvedi who holds a B.Tech degree from IIT Bombay founded ThinkLABS in 2006.

Goyal with help from his IIT Bombay batchmates put together a robotics kit and prepared content which centered on educating students on mechanical engineering. Seeing the positive response they got, the firm has now expanded and uses robots to train and educate students in 23 states of India and claim to have touched the lives of 1,00,000 school students. ThinkLABS has also partnered with 23 colleges in the country.

Grey Orange Robotics

Innovators: Samay Kohli & Akash Gupta

Institute: Birla Institute of Technology, Pilani

The idea of building robots was developed by Samay Kohli and Akash Gupta while tooling around in class which further led them to develop a robot which initially waited tables at their college canteen and thereafter were used as tour guides for people/guests attending seminars and conferences at BITS Pilani.

These young lads then took to programming their robots better and established Grey Orange Robotics in 2009. The firm builds robots for companies helping them automate their warehouses. The robots are usually developed to move shelves and products from one place to the other at warehouses.

E-Dog

Innovators: Prof. V Ramgopal Rao & team

Institute: IIT Bombay

Electrical engineering department’s chair professor V Ramgopal Rao along with his team of able students has developed a device which at present is informally referred to as E-dog. As per Professor Rao, this device can perform tasks which are performed by sniffer dogs and it can also work as a metal detector.

This device is made up of cantilevers which consist of nano-sensors. The developing team claims that the E-dog would be able to detect RDX from a distance of 1.5 feet if the bag containing the explosives is placed in a closed room/area.

IIT Bombay has patented multiple aspects of the E-dog and the device is expected to be made available in the market by 2015. This electronic device will be sold in collaboration with NanoSniff Technologies Pvt Ltd.

Matsya

Innovators: Chintan Raikar, Sneh Vaswani, Prashant Iyengar, Shivendra Singh, Anay Joshi, Mihir Gupta, Amit Kumar, Akash Verma, Savant Krishna, Satwik Kottur, Suryapratap Babar, MV Deepak, Nilesh Kulkarni, Rakesh Kumar, Dinesh Kumar, Kunal Tyagi, Hardik Godara, Sant Kumar, Anshuman Kumar Tushar Sharma, Sanidhya Gupta and Devyesh Tondon.

Institute: IIT Bombay

The team leader for this invention is Sneh Vaswani and this project is supported by many corporate sponsors. Matsya is an underwater vehicle which is being developed to help in marine navigation, marine research as well in underwater rescue operations.

Currently an upgraded version of this underwater vehicle is being developed by the name of Matsya 2.0 by this team of IIT Bombay students.

Exotel

Innovator: Shivakumar Ganesan

Institute: Birla Institute of Technology, Pilani

Shivakumar Ganesan, an alumnus of BITS Pilani founded Exotel with Vijay Sharma, Siddharth Ramesh and Ishwar Sridharan in 2010 but launched the cloud-based mobile solution in June 2011.

Exotel offers cloud telephony wherein a single mobile number is linked to multiple mobile phones. As part of this business venture, a toll free number or mobile number is bought by a customer for a tariff of Rs 6,000 per quarter. The customer can then use this number for sending SMSes, make outgoing calls as well as receive incoming calls.

The firm was established keeping small and medium enterprises in mind and the solution was developed to help them deal with their call centre and server needs.  

These are some of the many innovations conceptualized by our bright engineering students. We hope and pray that engineering students stay motivated and keep on pooling in their skills and out-of-the-box thinking to formulate many more such helpful inventions.