kaunatharva?

Power-harvesting army boots — laser-textured TENG →

An army boot that generates its own electricity from walking. A triboelectric nanogenerator in the sole is laser-textured at 355 nm to raise its output, then rectified and stored to run GPS and RFID for locating and identifying soldiers — with no battery to change. Ten pairs were built and delivered to ARDE, Pune.

DRDO / ARDB-funded, three years, led by Prof. I.A. Palani at IIT Indore. Atharva’s first project in that lab: the impedance-matching and rectification circuit, which improved charging efficiency by 54%. Patent filed.

• deployed
• where am i?
• unplugged

Gait-analysis shoes for early Alzheimer’s detection

A wearable shoe embedded with TENG sensors to monitor gait abnormalities.

Stopped for three reasons: his own expertise ceiling at the time, TENG not showing promise, and training data that would have needed hospital access to patients.

• abandoned
• where am i?
• unplugged

Morphobot — a drone that lands and drives away →

flying is expensive. if the ground is drivable, don’t fly.

A vehicle that flies to a site, lands, folds its rotor arms down and drives on the rotor guards as wheels — then reaches into rubble with a 4-axis arm actuated by shape memory alloy and steered by hand gestures. Built for disaster response: search from the air, work on the ground.

Two prototypes. Mechatronics & Instrumentation Lab, IIT Indore, under Prof. I.A. Palani. With Soham Mondal and Tejal Uplenchwar.

• where am i?

Line follower → patrolling bot

the makerspace course asked for a line follower. we had to add one feature of our own.

A line-following robot that streams live camera footage back to a PC. An SOS button on the device notifies the control centre and puts the bot into a 360° rotation so it can be found.

First-year Makerspace course project, IIT Indore.

• where am i?

Custom ESP32 flight controller

A custom flight-controller PCB integrating MPU6050 IMU, magnetometer and optical flow sensor. EKF sensor fusion achieving a 25-minute stable hover in GPS-denied conditions.

STARC Lab, IIT Indore.

• where am i?

Eternal — autonomous warehouse inventory robot →

A Jetson Orin Nano-powered AMR: ROS2/Nav2, RPLidar A1 SLAM, AMCL localization, four-channel ultrasonic obstacle avoidance. ±7 cm horizontal, ±0.02 cm vertical. Belt-driven Z-axis scanning 200–1800 mm with 100% QR detection.

Bronze Medal, Inter IIT Tech Meet 14.0, among all IITs.

• award
• where am i?

Low-speed wind tunnel with LED-based PIV

A low-cost tabletop wind tunnel with transparent test section and custom contraction–diffuser geometry, plus an LED-based PIV alternative using OpenCV optical flow to visualise velocity fields.

Self-powered IoT fault detection — TENG + STL–CNN–LSTM

A deep-learning fault detection pipeline for rotating machinery using TENG sensors as self-powered vibration transducers. STL decomposition across seven fault classes, 1D-CNN feature extraction, LSTM temporal modelling. 98.57% accuracy — beating oscilloscope (97.31%) and accelerometer (95.83%) baselines.

• published
• unplugged

Autonomous & glove-controlled collaborative robot →

Two ways to drive an Addverb Syncro 5 six-axis cobot. Say “pick up the red bottle” and an LLM extracts the intent, a depth camera sweeps the workspace, YOLO closed-loop visual servoing centres the target, and the arm grasps and retracts unaided. Or wear an ESP32 sensor glove and fly it by hand, seven gestures classified online at ~20 Hz.

Team of 8. Featured on Addverb Technologies’ official blog.

• published
• where am i?

DUNE — Dual UWB Navigation Engine →

UWB-based indoor localization for a six-wheeled rocker-bogie rover in GPS-denied environments. Sub-7 cm positional accuracy in a 2×2 m arena via two-anchor two-way ranging. Dual-tag heading estimation with EKF fusion of UWB, wheel odometry and IMU.

IEEE paper submitted. Open-source library plus hardware. Centre for Mechatronics, IIT Kanpur.

• published
• where am i?