I hope you’re all doing great!
Team Proboticists, a student Tech club at IIT Kharagpur, India comprising 30+ students from B.Tech, M.Tech, and PhD programs, seeks to collaborate with NVIDIA in robotics for national and international competitions. As our last achievement, we started our journey by successfully completing the first prototype of our Quadruped bot, Pro-pup, in 28 days in spring semester 2025; and over the past three months, we have also dedicated ourselves to rigorous training of new members of our team, thus creating an extensive 80-hour training program through our collective efforts.
We are particularly focused on the International Rover Challenge (IRC) 2026, organized by the Space Robotics Society, BITS Pilani Goa organized at Udupi, Karnataka, India. and the University Rover Challenge (URC) 2026, organized by the Mars Society, University of South California organized at Utah, USA. These competition requires the design of a Mars Rover Project robust enough to survive and operate in harsh environmental conditions.
Right now, we’re looking to step up our game and incorporate advanced AI and robotics capabilities into our systems. That’s where the Jetson development board comes in! We’re super excited about its potential to power our Mars Rover and Quadruped Robot, but as a student team, we could really use some support to make this happen.
We solely believe in fast and efficient execution with priority of completing what we started. Our team has been working on these projects for the last 6 months, and is now ready to start hardware execution on the project.
The problem statement requires autonomous and perception design which require running computer vision, image processing, possible by Jetson Development boards. We’d be incredibly grateful if NVIDIA could help us out with a Jetson board sponsorship or any kind of discount that might be available. We are completely student funded and hence find it hard to meet our goals without some support. It would mean the world to us and go a long way in helping us develop even more innovative projects.
Feel free to reach out if you’d like to know more about us, our projects, or how we plan to use the Jetson board. We’re happy to share more details and discuss any opportunities!
Thanks a lot for your time and consideration. We’re looking forward to hearing from you!
Best regards,
Pranav Mangal Pandey
Executive Chief, Team Proboticists
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, West Bengal
Email: proboticists@gmail.com
Website: https://proboticists.tech/