Dhanbad, Sept. 14: If students of BIT, Sindri, are excelling in the science of robotics, they have a group of seniors to thank.

Meet Robo Pioneer, a group of techies who have made it their mission to popularise educational robotics and embedded systems among their younger colleagues by organising special classes, workshops and training programmes.

Established a year ago on campus, Robo Pioneer has already seen success in the form of top prizes at major technology festivals at various campuses across the country, including Tichniche‘09 at IIT, Guwahati, held early this month.

This apart, BITians trained by Robo Pioneer won a majority of the events at Srijan, the annual tech fest organised by ISMU, Dhanbad, in April.

Shashank Pandey, the leader of Robo Pioneer who is also a mechanical engineering final year student of the institute, recalled how while participating at various tech fests they realised lack of crowd support and training were the prime reasons for students not doing well at competitions.

That’s how the idea to train students in robotics developed. “We now have the complete infrastructure for providing training in mechanical and semi-autonomous robotics and are in the process of developing it for autonomous robotics too,” said Pandey.

Teachers do their bit. Among those who are avid backers of the endeavour are R.K. Gupta of electrical engineering, R.K. Srivastava of production engineering _ he is also R&D head of the institute_ and Sanjay Singh of mechanical engineering.

Pandey, who is also a member of the institute’s training and placement cell, said special classes were usually held on Sundays and other holidays. He was confident that training for autonomous robotics would begin soon after Puja vacations.

On the future of Robo Pioneer, he said they were in touch with BIT alumni and were planning to develop the group on the lines of Tri-India of IIT Bombay and Robosapiens of IIT Kanpur.

“We will also organise workshops and classes outside the institute in several parts of eastern India to develop an interest among the youth towards robotics,” he said.