CSD Robocon NITK

Founded in 2017, CSD Robocon NITK is the official robotics team of the National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK), Surathkal. We are a group of interdisciplinary undergraduates mentored by Dr. Gangadharan KV and Dr. Pruthviraj U at the Centre for System Design. We represent our institution at the prestigious ABU Robocon competition.

The Project: ABU Robocon 2025

For the 2025 season, the ABU Robocon theme was "Robot Basketball". The challenge required participating teams to build two robots to play basketball against two opponents. The matches were played with a modified ruleset tailored to the robots' capabilities, where the team with the most points at the end of a 120-second match would win.

The robots were programmed to perform complex operations, including odometry, driving mechanisms, and calculating shooting parameters in real time. This season, the team utilized the ROS2 framework to parallelize and separate tasks effectively.

Our PCB: ARIA (Advanced Robotic Intelligence and Actuation)

To meet the computational and control demands of the season, we designed a custom PCB called ARIA—Advanced Robotic Intelligence and Actuation.

ARIA is a dual-module robotic control system designed for our high-performance basketball-playing robots. It serves as the core of our electronics subsystem.

Key Features of ARIA:

• Architecture: It features a top-bottom motherboard architecture with auxiliary daughterboards.
• Control Unit: The system integrates a Single Board Computer (Raspberry Pi) as the master controller and a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller unit (MCU). This setup allows the master controller to make high-level decisions while the MCU handles sensor readings and execution.
• Reliability: ARIA includes an independent safety monitoring PCB and is built for ruggedness and modularity, ensuring precise actuation and real-time diagnostics.

Why PCBWay?

As a student team, we face challenges in sourcing and manufacturing high-precision parts within our budget and timeline. The ability to quickly prototype complex, multi-layer boards like ARIA is crucial for testing our designs and ensuring reliability on the field. Support from PCBWay would allow us to refine our technology, provide valuable design experience to our members, and continue our mission to "Engineer the Impossible".