the work
everything, in order, from a dustbin lid at eleven to a rover that does not know where it is yet. the ones that failed are in here too.
- ~2018
Portable extension box
The size of a power socket. Housed three devices plus a bulb socket.
The first thing he remembers making. No photograph survives.
- 2018
Smart dustbin
An ultrasonic sensor and a servo. The lid opens when a hand comes near.
Age 11. The first measurement.
- ~2019
Mini piano
Buttons, tones, and a speaker.
- 2019
Office chair
i wanted an office chair. my father wouldn’t buy me one.
A broken chair pulled out of scrap and welded back together.
Broke again a few months later.
- ~2019
Phone-controlled bulb
A light switched on and off from a phone.
- ~2019
Wireless specs finder
A wireless tag for locating a misplaced pair of glasses.
- 2020
Folding study table
Built as his part of a home interior his father was contracted for.
Delivered to a client at 13.
- ~2020
Soundbar
Built from scratch.
- 2021
Bag weight distributor
A school bag that redistributes its own load.
INSPIRE Award MANAK, Department of Science & Technology, Govt. of India. ₹10,000.
- ~2021
The Santa that dispensed Fanta
me and a friend were bored on christmas.
A Santa with lit-up eyes, wired to a bottle, dispensing Fanta from his urinal.
Made to pass the time. It worked.
- 2025
Custom ESP32 flight controller
A custom flight-controller PCB integrating MPU6050 IMU, magnetometer and optical flow sensor. EKF sensor fusion achieving a 25-minute stable hover in GPS-denied conditions.
STARC Lab, IIT Indore.
- 2025
Eternal — autonomous warehouse inventory robot →
A Jetson Orin Nano-powered AMR: ROS2/Nav2, RPLidar A1 SLAM, AMCL localization, four-channel ultrasonic obstacle avoidance. ±7 cm horizontal, ±0.02 cm vertical. Belt-driven Z-axis scanning 200–1800 mm with 100% QR detection.
Bronze Medal, Inter IIT Tech Meet 14.0, among all IITs.
- 2025
Gait-analysis shoes for early Alzheimer’s detection
A wearable shoe embedded with TENG sensors to monitor gait abnormalities.
Stopped for three reasons: his own expertise ceiling at the time, TENG not showing promise, and training data that would have needed hospital access to patients.
- 2024–25
Line follower → patrolling bot
the makerspace course asked for a line follower. we had to add one feature of our own.
A line-following robot that streams live camera footage back to a PC. An SOS button on the device notifies the control centre and puts the bot into a 360° rotation so it can be found.
First-year Makerspace course project, IIT Indore.
- 2024–25
Micromouse
A maze-solving robot.
- 2025
Morphobot — a drone that lands and drives away →
flying is expensive. if the ground is drivable, don’t fly.
A vehicle that flies to a site, lands, folds its rotor arms down and drives on the rotor guards as wheels — then reaches into rubble with a 4-axis arm actuated by shape memory alloy and steered by hand gestures. Built for disaster response: search from the air, work on the ground.
Two prototypes. Mechatronics & Instrumentation Lab, IIT Indore, under Prof. I.A. Palani. With Soham Mondal and Tejal Uplenchwar.
- 2025
NoGPS autonomous drone — ISRO Robotics Challenge →
An autonomous aerial drone for Martian-surface operation: real-time terrain mapping, safe-spot detection, GPS-independent landing.
IROC 2025. The archive contains a folder Atharva named “fails” — six crash videos.
- 2021–24
Power-harvesting army boots — laser-textured TENG →
An army boot that generates its own electricity from walking. A triboelectric nanogenerator in the sole is laser-textured at 355 nm to raise its output, then rectified and stored to run GPS and RFID for locating and identifying soldiers — with no battery to change. Ten pairs were built and delivered to ARDE, Pune.
DRDO / ARDB-funded, three years, led by Prof. I.A. Palani at IIT Indore. Atharva’s first project in that lab: the impedance-matching and rectification circuit, which improved charging efficiency by 54%. Patent filed.
- 2024–25
Quadruped & robotic arm
A four-legged walking robot and a multi-axis manipulator arm.
Robotics Club projects, IIT Indore.
- 2025–
Universal Machine Management System (RFID access control) →
Full-stack access-control infrastructure across five lab machines: ESP32 + MFRC522 RFID nodes with relay actuation, an automated card dispenser, an RPi 5 issuing station, and a Firebase backend with a real-time dashboard.
IITISoC Gold Medal. Grand Innovation & Best Maker Award, IAMS 2025, ₹62,500. Patent in progress. Operational in Tinkerers’ Lab, IIT Indore.
- 2026
Aqualoop — in-pipe water monitoring and selective recycling →
A module that fits between any two pipes and powers itself from the water running through it. A micro-hydro turbine charges the electronics; pH, TDS and turbidity sensors feed a polynomial regression on the microcontroller to produce a live water quality score. At a building inlet it verifies the incoming supply and flags contamination. At the outlet it drives smart diverter valves, splitting used water into a recycling tank or the septic line — instead of treating everything as one waste stream.
Second place, Vishwakarma Awards 2026 — among 1,054 teams. ₹80,000. Team of 5.
- Feb 2026
Autonomous & glove-controlled collaborative robot →
Two ways to drive an Addverb Syncro 5 six-axis cobot. Say “pick up the red bottle” and an LLM extracts the intent, a depth camera sweeps the workspace, YOLO closed-loop visual servoing centres the target, and the arm grasps and retracts unaided. Or wear an ESP32 sensor glove and fly it by hand, seven gestures classified online at ~20 Hz.
Team of 8. Featured on Addverb Technologies’ official blog.
- 2nd yr
Ball balancing bot
A balancing platform.
On neither résumé.
- 2026
DUNE — Dual UWB Navigation Engine →
UWB-based indoor localization for a six-wheeled rocker-bogie rover in GPS-denied environments. Sub-7 cm positional accuracy in a 2×2 m arena via two-anchor two-way ranging. Dual-tag heading estimation with EKF fusion of UWB, wheel odometry and IMU.
IEEE paper submitted. Open-source library plus hardware. Centre for Mechatronics, IIT Kanpur.
- 2026–
GPS-denied UWB drone–rover cooperative navigation
A four-phase cooperative autonomy architecture: a drone autonomously deploys UWB anchors for centimetre-level rover localization. Onboard EKF fuses UWB, optical flow and IMU; a MAVLink/ROS2 bridge carries drone–rover comms.
First-author oral, NSSS 2026 (ISRO-sponsored) — selected among 40 students nationwide. Sub-10 cm on live hardware.
- Jan–May 2026
Large-format cartesian cement 3D printer →
1000×1000×600 mm. SFU1605 ball-screw X/Y, C-beam Z-axis, hopper-auger extrusion, NEMA 23 steppers, Arduino Mega + RAMPS 1.4. End-to-end component sourcing, Fusion 360 CAD, and hardware integration.
Sold to and deployed in a research laboratory.
- 2025–26
Low-speed wind tunnel with LED-based PIV
A low-cost tabletop wind tunnel with transparent test section and custom contraction–diffuser geometry, plus an LED-based PIV alternative using OpenCV optical flow to visualise velocity fields.
- 2026
Self-powered IoT fault detection — TENG + STL–CNN–LSTM
A deep-learning fault detection pipeline for rotating machinery using TENG sensors as self-powered vibration transducers. STL decomposition across seven fault classes, 1D-CNN feature extraction, LSTM temporal modelling. 98.57% accuracy — beating oscilloscope (97.31%) and accelerometer (95.83%) baselines.
19 of these do not have their own page yet. they are being written.