Students Going to Romania for Bosch Finals

It’s a first not just for Ahmedabad University but for India. Five Ahmedabad students (Team Akatsuki) have successfully passed the mid-season qualifying gate exam of the Bosch Future Mobility Challenge to reach the finals to be held in Romania next month. Theirs was one among the only two Indian university teams that qualified for the event for the first time since Bosch initiated the challenge in 2017. Only Team Akatsuki made the final cut, surpassing students of Vellore Institute of Technology.

Team Akatsuki
Kaushal Patil - School of Engineering and Applied Science, BTech with Major in Information and Computer Technology (Class of ‘22)
Panth Patel - School of Engineering and Applied Science, BTech with Major in Information and Computer Technology (Class of ‘22)
Arpitsinh Vaghela - School of Engineering and Applied Science, BTech with Major in Information and Computer Technology (Class of ‘22)
Manan Anjaria - School of Engineering and Applied Science (BTech with Major in Mechanical Engineering (Class of ‘23)
Aditya Raj - School of Arts and Sciences, BS (Hons) with Major in Computer Science (Class of ‘22)
Mentored by: Professor Maryam Kaveshgar, Assistant Professor, School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Bosch Future Mobility Challenge is an international autonomous driving and connectivity competition for bachelor’s and master’s students. Every year, the competition invites student teams to develop autonomous driving and connectivity algorithms on 1/10 scale vehicles provided by the company, to navigate in a designated environment simulating a miniature smart city. The students work on their projects in collaboration with Bosch experts and academic professors for several months to develop the best-performing algorithms.

Kaushal Patil, who has earlier led a team to win Intel’s AI Global Impact Festival 2021, and is now on Team Akatsuki, says that Bosch presented a tough challenge. “It was a rigorous project where we developed algorithms for a car for lane keeping, signs’ detection, local GPS, intersection navigation, path planning and automatic tracking. We are working on a few complex algorithms, for overtaking and tracking the car ahead, for our finals,” says Kaushal, adding that his interest in the field was piqued by Professor Kaveshgar’s session on Mobile Robots that he had attended earlier. According to him, working with like minded students across disciplines helped as it seemed exactly like an industry project. “We chalked out our roles right at the beginning and delegated work, looking at the value each of us would bring to a job rather than just the programme we came from.”

The team is now busy finalising its project while interacting on the Bosch forum and on an Instagram handle with other teams from across the world. “It’s great exposure, and there is a lot of transparency among the contenders. We can catch up with how each of us is preparing for the finals,” he says.

The team has been invited by Bosch to Romania for the Bosch Future Mobility Day between May 10 and 16 to compete with 29 other teams from around the world.