IIT Gandhinagar summer internship gives lease to futuristic projects

AHMEDABAD: Developing unmanned vehicle navigation system for all kinds of roads, project to develop applications to use eye movement of a person with neurological disorders like cerebral palsy and designing a remote controlled fireproof robot for firefighting were some of the futuristic projects displayed at Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IIT-Gn) on Friday.The projects, which were carried out by students from across the country during their summer research internship programme (SRIP) at IIT-Gn, were displayed in the form of poster presentations.
Prof Shanmuganathan Raman, one of the coordinators of SRIP, said, “We are excited with the kind of work and results the students have produced during their internship in just a little over two months’ duration. Therefore, we decided to provide them a platform to showcase and share their projects with the research community. We have plans to extend the summer research internships at IIT-Gn to more students from top universities of the world in future.”
Kapil Soni, a BTech student of Charoter University of Science and Technology in Anand, said, “Our project aims to develop a system of navigating cars through any kind of roads with the help of GPS. We install a device on the vehicle which keeps it connected to the satellite. Any obstacle that comes towards in its way, potshots and speed breakers are detected by the satellite and the vehicle is maneuvered automatically.”
The SRIP at IIT-Gn also had international participants. Catherine Wargo of University at Albany, State University of New York, was researching to understand the Indian context of ‘active aging’. “We found that Active aging in India is significantly associated with education, household, income and good health. It was also found that higher household income and work status are associated with active aging behavior,” said Wargo who was interning with Prof Tannistha Samantha.
More than 180 students from educational institutes all over the country, including several IITs, undertook internships at IIT-Gn this summer. The number of students seeking to join SRIP nearly doubled this year to more than 9,200 from 4,865 applicants last year.