Robots, football, and a very useful meeting excuse
From a summer camp at eight to football-playing robots at KRSSG—and the people who made me want to be part of it.
I got into robotics when I was eight, at a summer camp at Techknowledge Education in 2011. I didn’t have some grand plan for where it would take me. I just thought robots were cool.
That turned out to be a good enough reason to keep going.
Over the next few years, robotics became a regular part of my life. I went to competitions, learned new things, and kept finding reasons to come back. Looking back, it’s funny how something that started at a summer camp eventually became such a big part of my college experience.
Before the football-playing robots
A few competitions stand out from those early years.
At the Robofest World Championship, I finished first in the national round and qualified for the finals in Michigan, USA. I couldn’t travel for the finals, which was disappointing, but qualifying was still a big moment for me.
I also competed in the World Robot Olympiad, finishing second in the regional rounds in both 2014 and 2015 and advancing to the nationals each time.
Later, at the Winter School of AI and Robotics, I spent an intensive workshop learning about computer vision and machine learning and finished third.
These are the neat, easy-to-list milestones. They tell part of the story, but they don’t quite explain why I wanted to keep doing robotics. For that, I probably need to talk about KRSSG.
Why I wanted to join KRSSG so badly
When I got to IIT Kharagpur, I wanted to join a research group. From all the fundae I’d gathered on campus, these were places where people were serious about what they did, and where the learning curve was steep. That sounded like something I wanted to be part of.
So I attended the introduction seminars of all the research groups.
The Kharagpur Robo Soccer Students’ Group (KRSSG) stood out.
Well, they were building robots. That already had my attention. But what’s better than robots?
Robots playing football, obviously. XD
The seniors made it sound like a lot of fun. They seemed like people I’d enjoy working with, and there was this whole layer of insider jokes that I clearly didn’t understand yet. I wanted in. I wanted to know the stories behind those jokes and eventually have a few of my own.
Honestly, the vibe was a huge part of why I wanted to join. The technical work drew me in, but so did the people.
In 2022, I joined the software team.
Making six robots play together
Our group worked on strategies for six autonomous football-playing robots in a decentralized framework.
“Robots playing football” is a great introduction-seminar pitch. Working on the software meant getting into the details of how they would actually do it.
I worked on the skills and strategies behind how the bots moved and played together. There was a lot to learn about planning paths, coordinating their behaviour, and turning decisions in software into movement on the field.
That was a lot to take in during my first and second years of college. KRSSG gave me a place to work through it alongside people I wanted to learn from.
If you’d like to look under the hood, here’s the robot-soccer code on GitHub.
A research group meeting. Very unfortunate timing.
KRSSG also helped me with another important part of college life: getting out of things I really wanted to get out of.
“Hey man, I can’t really stay for the overnight Rangoli/ILLU prep. Yeah, bummer. I have to get to that research group meeting of mine.”
My roommates know exactly how many times I played that card. Let’s just say my finite state machine had a very reliable escape state. lol.
Jokes aside, KRSSG was a big part of my early college years. I joined because the work looked exciting and the people seemed fun. Being there helped me grow immensely.
When I think about why I wanted to join so badly, I still come back to that introduction seminar: football-playing robots, seniors laughing at jokes I didn’t get yet, and me wanting to be part of it all.