Karthik Swaminathan

Hi!! I am currently in final year of my B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering. I have an experience in Designing, Manufacturing, Coding,ROS, and Simulation. I am a Robotics enthusiast and would love to explore varied domains like soft robotics, bioinspired robotics, swarm robotics and SLAM.

Simulation of Soft Robot Hand

This was one of my personal projects that I did in Summer 2022 and the project is still going on.
Soft Robot Simulation is one of the challenging topics till now so many data-driven approaches are extensively researched upon. Simulation software like SOFA makes it easy to work and their solvers do the work showing close to realistic behaviours.
The prototypes were designed in SolidWorks and the FEM analysis of these structures were carried out.
Based on the higher bending angle on application of same amount of pressure, Prototype 4 was chosen for the simulation purpose
The structure was meshed and exported for simulation
After importing in SOFA, various material properties, solvers, and constraints were defined and satisfactory motion of fingers were recorded

To check out the documentation of the work till now, click here

7th Delta Advanced Automation Contest

This contest was organized by Delta Electronics in March 2021 and me along with 2 other people formed a team and we had to submit a proposal that highlighted our idea of the project
We proposed a solution for efficient segregation and packaging of different sized boxes for a warehouse.
The plan was to make a gantry-based system for pick, place, and sorting of different size boxes into a bigger box with maximizing the volume occupancy and getting the size and orientation of boxes using vision.
We started developing and improving our gantry bot design by reaching out to various professors and industrial experts.
After the design was finalized, the parts were manufactured by different manufacturing techniques. In the end, the fabrication of the bot was carried out
We assembled the parts and tested the desired motions of the bot and conveyor.
Overcoming the obstacles that we faced especially due to the pandemic, we managed to bag Second Category Prize and were in Top 40 globally

To check out our work click here

Vitarana Drone: E-yantra

E-yantra is a robotics competition held by IIT Bombay which is approximately 6 months long consisting of tasks that have to be completed in a stipulated time
The competition contained several themes corresponding to topics like ROS, Image Processing, FPGA, and many more.
A team of 4 was made from our side and the theme we got was Vitarana (Delivery) Drone
Just as the name says, the end goal of the task was to control a drone, and using Obstacle Avoidance, Path Planning algorithms deliver the parcels from one place to other.
ROS and Gazebo were used for the simulation. Image processing techniques were used to detect QR codes and landing spots. Using PID the drone was tuned. I contributed to the logic behind the obstacle avoidance and path planning code.
After completing all the tasks, we reached the Top 20

To check out our work click here

SRA Autosim Challenge

SRA Autosim Challenge was conducted by SRA in December 2020. A team of 4 was made for this as well.
The competition involved building a urdf from scratch, solving grids using the shortest path to dump boxes at certain locations, line following using the camera, and wall following using lidar. After every step was done we had to end at the starting point
Everything was done in ROS and Gazebo and algorithms were written in Python. I was responsible for making the urdf of the bot and writing algorithm for line following.
We were in Top 3 in our college

To check out our work click here

Automated Parking System

Inspired by Tesla's self-driving cars, the automated parking of a car in the simulation was the aim of few students including me in 2020.
This project was done under Eklavya Mentorship Program conducted every year in summer by SRA where our seniors help us in implementing a non-physical idea into reality
The simulation software was Coppeliasim. My work area was to park the car parallelly.
The flow of parking was to detect an empty area and check out the dimensions of the empty area using sensors to ensure safe parking of the car.
The type of parking was made dependent on the orientation of cars around the parking space

To check out our work click here

Resume Maker

A website to simplify the creation of a universally accepted and very significant document called the Resume
The Front end of the website was done with the help of HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Bootstrap whereas the back-end was done in Python Flask. Latex was used to make templates of the Resume
Community of Coders (COC) started Inheritance Mentorship Program in 2020 and we used to get advice for any type of changes to be made from seniors
The Backend part and template making part was under my control

To check out our work click here