Innovative Smart Wheelchair gets VIT University students the first prize at the CoreEl- Digilent Design Contest

VIT University students have done it again. In a national level CoreEl- Digilent Design Contest (CDDC), two third year students of the B.Tech in electrical and electronic engineering Jagan Mohan and K. Dinesh Kumar have bagged the first prize. Their innovation was a Smart Wheelchair that can be operated and controlled by the physically disabled through voice command. One can give simple instructions such as Forward, left, right, backward and so on. I have been researching on speech recognition for the past six months and chanced upon an advertisement for this competition and decided to enroll myself, says Mohan. Along with team member Kumar, the two designed the Smart Wheelchair for the competitions India chapter. The two have been given Rs 40,000 as cash prize and a trophy. This national level electronics hardware design contest for students had invited innovative digital design projects featuring Digilent's FPGA boards. With a total of 102 teams comprising of 240 students and 88 faculty members taking part in CDDC 2013, a group of eminent panelists shortlisted the Top 20 design ideas from among all the project proposals. These 20 teams were then provided with the hardware necessary to implement their projects. This hardware included the latest FPGA boards and related accessories. The teams implemented their projects, submitted the detailed project report and a brief video demonstration. The top four teams from across the country were invited to Bangalore for the final presentation and felicitation. The felicitation ceremony also included a seminar on Recent Trends in VLSI Technology which was attended by academicians. Jagan Mohan says he now plans to further his research on the topic. With the prize money, we now plan to design a real-time demo model, said Mohan. Thanking the constant support of their professor N. Ramesh Babu Kumar said, We have been lucky to be encouraged and have unfailing support of our teacher-in-charge and the Chancellor Dr. G.Viswanathan. We would like to take this opportunity to thank VIT University for enabling us an atmosphere of innovation.