Outstanding Achievement by TechAvatars

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Students From L to R : Ayush Sinha, Yash Saxena, Shaunak Kulkarni, Pranav Ebburu, Shabab Haque

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Copy of the Publication may be Found HERE

STEM and Robotics Academy congratulates the First Group of TechAVATARS ( Year 2014) for their outstanding achievement. We were just informed that,their research work has been reviewed and Published in one of the worlds most reputed Conferences on Solid Freeform Fabrication. It was one of the rare occasions when such a young group of students shared the Stage with prominent researchers from the world to present their research work on ” A Reconfigurable System to Enhance the Work Envelope of a Solid Freeform Fabrication System” at the 2016 Annual International Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium held in Austin, Texas, USA on August 8-10, 2016.

The conference participants represented 20 countries and Research Institutions such as NASA Langley Research Center, Department of Energy, , MIT, Air Force Research Laboratory,National Institute of Standards and Technology etc.

What had started as a robotics team transformed into a group of young Researchers that hope to contribute in the Field of Science, Engineering and Technology. In the fall of 2014, team TechAVATARs came together to prepare for the competition in First Lego League. While their performance in the Robot Games Category was applauded, they could not advance to next stage due to shortage of time. Learning from Their experience, Next year they formed two teams TechAVATARS and Psi-fighters who went onto win the Robot Performance (both TechAVATARS and Psi-fighters), Robot Design TechAVATARS and Best Project Psi-fighters in the season 2015-2016.

Later as they were exploring the next level of competitive Robotics – FTC, they frequently faced the problem of building custom parts on need basis. While machining was one of the options, it would limit the design that they could build with the help of available machines. One of the alternate Avenues was – 3D printing; however, the work envelope of the 3D printers started to become a limiting factor. That is when, group got together and decided to push the technology to next level.
During the summer of 2016, the group got together and came up with a unique Reconfigurable 3D printing Architecture. In fact, they came up with two very unique approaches – Axis Stacking Method and Common Vehicle Approach. The group worked tirelessly, customizing, modifying and applying their out of box innovation to use some of the specialty engineering drives. To their relief, the tools, methods and libraries provided by the RepRap community was extremely helpful in being able to prototype the system. The system is still far from perfection however; it was good enough to demonstrate the workability of the idea.

Inspired by the success, the group decided to share this innovation with the Research Community at large. To the same end, the group submitted the abstract of their work to one of the most reputed conferences in the field of Additive Manufacturing – 2016 Annual International Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium – held in Austin, Texas, USA on August 8-10, 2016. The conference was attended by 540 researchers from Reputed Institution across the world, representing 20 countries. Research Institution such as NASA Langley Research Center, Department of Energy, MIT, Oxford University, fraunhofer institute, Indian Institute of Technology, US Air Force Research Laboratory, US National Institute of Standards and Technology etc. A total of 391 presentations were given, 337 oral presentations and 54 posters. The students got an opportunity to present their research work and their work was applauded by many researchers. The work has also been included to be published in the Conference Proceedings. In a place where minimum qualification of presenters typically is Research Graduate students, presentation and later acceptance of research work for publishing is very inspiring.