My experience at eyrc 2020-21
I participated in E-Yantra Robotics Competition this year and just wanted to write my experience for people who will come after me.
So every single year E-YRC is a big deal at my college , everybody from 1st year to 4th year students participate in this 6 month long marathon of tasks .
Generally it starts in September after the preferences and the forms have been filled. Your team is assigned a theme and you are supposed to build it out step by step , task by task .
The theme that got assigned to our team this year was Sahayak Bot. Sahayak bot basically was your lab assistant , you gave it a map of the lab and then gave it what to pick and where to place it . It would autonomously go to that room , find the object , pick it and place it appropriately .
I have to say it was honestly the most fun and tiring six months in my entire life .
Me and My team , we laughed , we cried , we sweared at the simulated robot and just had a ton of fun . In the end we made it to the Finals where shit got serious .
Out of around the 400 teams in our theme only 7 made it to the finals and we were one of those 7 teams . In any other year , the finals would have happened at IITB with the actual hardware but thanks to some man in China who though eating a bat would be fun , they happened live over [Youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XF7nTVlUe18). It was really fun interacting with the judges live and the entire E-Yantra team was very co-operative and engaging.
Hence I would recommend anyone and everyone , doesn't matter what year , doesn't matter what branch to just participate in this event and go all in .
It takes hardwork and determination to run this marathon and get through with it.
Here are some things I learnt -:
- ROS and how to use various libraries and stuff with it
- Teamwork
- True meaning of "Never give up"
- The importance of Planning before implementing
My advice to people participating
- The biggest fattest piece of advice I can give you is
Choose your team-mates Correctly
My team mates were Naman and Jasmeet and honestly I couldn't have asked for better ones .
There are so many teams out there that pick the wrong team-mates and suffer for the next 6 months because only one or two people in the team are working and the rest just slacked off . Even we had picked a fourth guy who did no work at all but that wasn't due to slacking off it was due to some family problems which we understood hence didn't bug him .
- Another piece of Advice would be to
Not give up
Trust me , I know python doesn't want to work with you . It's fine , happens to everyone just don't stop debugging and just don't stop learning . It gets better , the debugging gets easier , it really does
In the end I would just like to conclude by saying that you should definitely participate in eyrc no matter who you are or where you are , there is something in there to learn for you .