e-Yantra is a robotics outreach program funded by the Ministry of Education and hosted at IIT Bombay. The goal is to harness the talent of young engineers to solve problems using technology across a variety of domains such as: agriculture, manufacturing, defence, home, smart-city maintenance and service industries.

Residents of developing countries, particularly the urban poor, are disproportionately affected by unsustainable garbage management. Hence, managing waste properly is essential for building sustainable and livable cities. The primary aim of the proposed work is to segregate materials such as metals, wet, and dry.

This theme comprises a robot deployed to collect different types of wastes and dispose them into separate bins. The robot swiftly navigates through the different cities to collect segregated waste and then goes to the dumping area to dispose of them in different bins.

In this theme, the team builds the SB Bot for deployment on an arena which is an abstraction of a Smart City. The brain of the robot is powered by an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) that controls its sensors, actuators and pick-place mechanism.

Major challenges and learnings in this theme include building the Swatchhta Bot from scratch using an FPGA. This FPGA based robot is able to traverse the arena, sense the environment and collect and dispose of the waste. It uses wired and wireless communication techniques. This theme helps teams build a sophisticated architecture using Verilog HDL to unveil the powerful parallel processing capabilities of FPGAs.