Team MOVIS

Overview

Team MOVIS is VIT Chennai's special university team working at the frontier of space exploration technology - rovers, Mars drones, planetary mobility systems, and autonomous robotics. This isn't a casual club. MOVIS competes on national and international stages, submits work to NASA, and builds things that are expected to perform under real pressure. I joined as a Mechatronics Engineer, contributing across mechanical design, systems integration, competition preparation, and ideation submissions.

🚀 NASA HERC 2024-2025

Human Exploration Rover Challenge - Ideation Round

The NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge is one of the most prestigious student engineering competitions in the world - where teams design, build, and race a human-powered rover across a simulated extraterrestrial terrain course at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.

MOVIS participated in the ideation round of HERC 2024-2025. I contributed to the mechatronics systems concept - working through rover design proposals, drivetrain architecture, mechanical-electrical integration strategies, and building a submission that could stand up to NASA's evaluation standards.

Having your engineering concepts reviewed against NASA's criteria - even at the ideation stage - is a completely different level of accountability. Every design decision needs to be justified, documented, and technically defensible. It permanently sharpened how I approach system-level design thinking and engineering documentation.

⚔️ Technoxian 2024 - Combat Robotics

International Robotics Competition - Delhi

Technoxian is one of India's largest and most respected international robotics competitions - drawing teams from across the world to compete in high-stakes combat robotics. In 2024, MOVIS built a combat robot, packed it into bags, and took it to Delhi.

The Build

Preparation began in June 2024 with a deliberate shift in approach - meticulously selecting streamlined electronics, optimising every component decision, and building confidence into the system long before the competition floor. Building a competitive combat bot on a minimal budget was genuinely hard. Every rupee had to justify its place on the robot. The team engineered around the constraint rather than cutting functionality to save money. After multiple iterations, trials, and reworks - the bot was ready to fight.

The Competition

The journey wasn't clean. The team faced weapon malfunctions, timing belt failures mid-fight, and accumulated damage across rounds - bent weapon, detached wedges, deformed aluminum shell. But between quick overnight repairs, invaluable support from a local workshop worker in Delhi who opened his tools to the team at short notice, and a bot that kept moving when others didn't - MOVIS pushed through.

The team faced the previous year's champion in the later rounds, fought hard, and ultimately tapped out - but not before ranking in the top 15 teams internationally at one of the most competitive robotics events in India.

What It Taught Us

Combat robotics at an international level taught the team something no lab session could - that reliability under punishment is its own engineering discipline. The progress from MOVIS's first competition was undeniable. Key areas for future optimization were identified. The team left Delhi energized, not defeated.

Third time's the charm. ✨

💡 Ideation Rounds

ISRO IROC - Ideation Round

Selected for the ideation stage of the ISRO Indian Rover Operations Challenge - developing rover design concepts evaluated against ISRO's standards for planetary exploration systems. Working on a rover concept that ISRO engineers would review forced a level of rigour and technical clarity that significantly sharpened my design communication skills.

Gujarat Techfest - Ideation Round

Participated in the ideation round at Gujarat Techfest - one of India's largest technical festivals. Presented and defended engineering concepts in a competitive format, learning how to distil complex system designs into clear, compelling proposals under time pressure.

What MOVIS Taught Me

MOVIS taught me that engineering under pressure is a completely different discipline from engineering in a lab.

When your weapon system fails at an international competition in Delhi at 10pm, you don't get to reschedule. You find Mr. Khan, you borrow his tools, you fix it, and you show up the next morning. When a Royal Rumble match damages three of your key systems simultaneously, you don't panic - you triage, you prioritize, and you keep the bot moving.

The best engineers don't just build well. They recover well. MOVIS taught me how to do both. And the ideation rounds - NASA, ISRO, Techfest - taught me that the ability to think clearly about a system before you build it is just as valuable as the ability to fix it when it breaks.

Both skills. Same engineer. That's what MOVIS gave me.

Telemetry Output & Communication Logs

To simulate autonomous navigation pathfinding and capture high-frequency wheel encoder logs, I structured the following custom terminal diagnostics:

By utilizing sensor-fusion libraries and refining physical skid-steering variables, we demonstrated that robust, real-time feedback loops significantly improve navigation tracking accuracy across highly irregular and sandy terrains.