All research

eYRC 2026-27 theme, 1500 teams

Niti Vahan

A new e-Yantra Robotics Competition theme on autonomous driving: a miniature car that follows city road rules.

  • Autonomous Driving
  • Perception
  • Control
  • Education & Outreach
Full theme run in the CoppeliaSim digital twin.

My contributions

  • Developed the electronics for a scratch-built miniature Ackermann vehicle.
  • Built the monocular perception and control stack: bird's-eye-view lane detection, PID steering, obstacle detection, lane switching and ArUco parking.
  • The theme was selected by 1500 teams nationally for eYRC 2026-27.

Niti Vahan is a newly developed theme for the e-Yantra Robotics Competition (eYRC) 2026-27, focused on autonomous driving and inspired in part by Duckietown. A miniature car drives a city arena under road rules: lanes, zebra crossings, no-overtaking zones, stop signs and parking. 1500 teams selected it nationally.

The vehicle and its stack

I built the electronics and the perception and control algorithms for a scratch-built miniature Ackermann vehicle. The stack is deliberately minimal, a Raspberry Pi and one USB camera, so student teams can reproduce it.

Lanes are found by bird's-eye-view warping, colour segmentation and polynomial fitting, then tracked with PID steering. On top of that run obstacle detection, lane switching and ArUco-based docking for parking.

On hardware: lane following and obstacle avoidance.

Simulation to hardware

Teams first build against a matched CoppeliaSim digital twin in Stage 1, then move the same stack to the physical car in Stage 2.