Students observe a robot at Nexus. Telegraph picture

Bhubaneswar, Oct. 16: Techno-freaks from the eastern zone got their grey cells working overtime at a robotics contest titled Nexus — Behind Enemy Lines held in the capital today. Nexus is the preliminary round of International Robotics Challenge (IRC), the flagship event of IIT-Bombay, which is being organised in five cities across India.

The eastern leg of the event was organised today at the Institute of Technical Education and Research (Iter). Around 12 teams, each comprising four members, from various technical institutions in the eastern zone participated here. The robots devised by the teams had to move around a black-and-white checkered arena, carefully avoiding obstacles, in the shortest time possible.

“The robot first traverses the whole maze, takes note of the obstacles and bridges and stores them in its memory. In the final run, it has to pick up two blocks, one by one, and cover the arena through the shortest path. Then it has to drop the blocks at specified locations and return to the starting point,” said Saswat Sahu, a student of Iter and one of the coordinators of Nexus.

Silencer, a team from National Institute of Technology (NIT), Rourkela, emerged champions today with 380 points. The coordinator from IIT-Bombay, Vaibhav, said it was so far the highest score recorded in this year’s Nexus. Another team from NIT, Rourkela, named Bumble Bee finished second with 25 points.

“We are overjoyed. This was a huge competition and we are especially happy that we set a record high score of 380 this year,” said Debabrata Mohapatra, member of the winning team, Silencer. The other members of the team are Subhransu Satpathy, Suchi Sraba Pattanayak and Soumya Ranjan Panda.

The top two teams – Silencer and Bumble Bee – from the eastern zone have gained direct entry into the national level round titled iNexus Indian Finale – No Man’s Land to be held at IIT-Bombay in January and would compete against teams from the north, south, west and central zones. The teams emerging victorious there would battle it out at the International Robotics Challenge – The Grand Finale where teams from Australia, Thailand and Sri Lanka would also participate.