Sandpaper - Business & Technology

“Even though we were in the middle of nowhere in the Mojave Desert , the atmosphere was charged. Helicopters were whirring overhead, with photographers hanging out the sides. The place was packed with supporters of Caltech, CMU, U of Florida, and the likes. In the midst of this excitement I was leading Team CajunBot (see www.cajunbot.com), a participant in the DARPA Grand Challenge. The challenge: To build an autonomous ground vehicle that would traverse around 200 miles of desert road in under ten hours.

Team CajunBot had made this far after some intense filtering. There were 106 initial applicants, who were filtered to 35 after design review, to 25 after a site visit, and then to 15 after a demonstration in an obstacle course in the California Speedway.

Here I was, leading Team CajunBot, while I had never tinkered with vehicle, electronics, power supplies, and generators. In the “Workshop” course in BITS I could not make my candle stand. In EEE lab I had a hard time getting transistors onto circuit boards. The only batteries I am comfortable handling are the ones in flash lights. Thanks to my early experiences at BITS shaped by Dr. Aditya P. Mathur, now in Purdue, I love programming languages and compilers, which is a far cry from robotics.

It was no surprise then when, a few days earlier, I heard Kunal Mohanlal on the other end of the phone asking “What are you doing building a robotic car?” The question got repeated several times as the article on my team in the Times of India of March 9th made its round. The questioners were my batch-mates from BITS, the ones who have known me for 27 years. These were people with whom I had shed boyishness in the Vyas Bhawan and with whom I had contemplated the purpose of life after receiving 2/20 in Calculus I.

Even after two and a half decades of our shared experience, I could answer their probing question by a simple phrase, “Operation G.M.B.” They’d retort, “But we lost that one.” And I’d say, “Yet it was fun and we gave them a run.”

In BITS Operation GMB was a project a handful of us started on a whim, on the way to C’Naught for an evening chai. The goal: To challenge the top dog in, of all things, the Student Union election. The top dog (Hi Sherif) was assumed to be the winner. No one was stepping up to challenge him. We figured it was our duty to make the top dog sweat and earn the title. Thus, the “B” in GMB stood for the staple food of the Giant Panda. We succeeded in our goal, getting enough votes to instill some fear, but not enough to be stuck with running the SU.

The venture in DARPA Grand Challenge was just another way to relive the days of BITS, or maybe an attempt to fight mid-life crisis. It started on a whim. Within three months it snowballed into a mega affair, with 23 members in the team, several sponsors, massive coverage in CNN, daily updates in the local print and TV news, and that article in the Times of India. The highpoint, though, was when a competitor from an esteemed university came up and said “We are rooting for you to take the ball from” the top dog.

Though the race ended with a whimper, with all the bots out within 7.3 miles, the experience, or should one say, the trip, was incredible. An unknown team, with no track record in robotics, had, in a matter of months, put together a pretty credible robotic vehicle that sent some jitters among the competitors. Mission accomplished.

Did BITS play a role? It did in more ways than one. Yes, the technical training I received in BITS, refined further through a Ph.D. in Case Western Reserve University, was valuable in this whole adventure. But the challenge was not in technology; it was in integrating people who knew the relevant technologies and in not being intimidated by ‘authorities.’ Quite coincidentally, I was prepared for taking on that challenge by the first Operation G.M.B in the middle of another desert many years ago. ■