Amrita bagged TechTop 2009 award

Chakshuyaan – an unmanned Vertical Take Off and Landing Aerial Vehicle, the innovative project of the Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amritapuri, Kollam, emerged best in the TechTop 2009, the all- India exhibition of Engineering Student Projects, which concluded at the Technopark here on Tuesday.

The prototype, which can be useful in the defence sector, remote monitoring, surveillance and even archaeological excavation and restoration, is developed by Shreyas Narsipur, Raghu I Menon, Shibesh Dutta, Vandana Vikram, Sreejith Nair and Vishnu under the guidance of Balakrishnan Shankar and Joshua David Freeman.

The design was adjudged the best among the selected 22 projects from various parts of the country that were exhibited at the venue and bagged the Degree C award. The team members received a cash prize of Rs.1 lakh and would receive the incubation facility offered by Technopark to meritorious projects.

The second prize went to the students of University Institute of Technology
, West Bengal, for the project: `Automation and enhancement of tea manufacturing by controlled environment fermentation of tea and endpoint detection and gradation using image sensing.’ The project was done by Raka Chowdhury, Sankha Subhra Mukherjee, Aveek Dasmalakar,Debangan Roy and Koushik Chakrabarty.

Kerala University Vice-Chancellor A Jayakrishnan distributed the prizes. Technopark CEO Merwin Alexander, Technopark New Initiatives CFO and Programme Co-ordinator K.C. Chandrasekharan Nair, Degree Controls founder and CTO Rajesh M Nair, Degree C India general manager and TechTop Co-ordinator Moosa C Kandy, UNIDO international energy consultant Prof. V K Damodaran and Motorola India CDMA Engineering Operations director Tilak Kesavapillai also attended the function.

The TechTop competition was jointly organised by the Degree Controls and supported by Technopark TBI, IEEE and Executive Knowledge Lines.