From aquariums steered by fish to pond-cleaning boats: Young engineers turn ideas into machines at Kochi lab

Kochi: What if a fish could steer its own aquarium? Or a homemade robot could venture into a weed-choked pond to tackle floating waste without triggering an ecological disaster? At TinkerSpace in Kochi, such seemingly playful questions became working hardware.

From July 12 to September 20, 15 students and recent graduates from across Kerala worked out of the workshop to build 10 hardware prototypes, ranging from an autonomous aquarium and aquatic cleanup robot to CubeSat hardware, drones and assistive technology.

The ‘Builder-in-Residence: Hardware Edition’, organised by non-profit tech community TinkerHub Foundation with online hardware platform Circuit Digest and Kochi’s Makergram, was designed to pull young engineers away from screens and software and back into the demanding world of physical machines.

One of the highlights at the concluding public demo was AquaNav, a mobile aquarium that follows the movement of the fish inside it. “Choosing an aquarium was about building something cool and learning from it,” said Niveditaa Sunu, a second-year Computer Science student at Model Engineering College (MEC), Thrikkakara. She built it with her teammate Jinu Rose Mathew, a student from Palakkad.

The aquarium sits on a wheeled motorised base. A camera connected to a tiny, low-cost, credit-card-sized computer tracks the goldfish’s movement, while the computer determines its direction and signals an ESP NodeMCU microcontroller to operate the motors.

“If the fish moves forward, the tires roll forward. To keep the water stable, we calibrated it to accelerate very gently at low speeds,” Niveditaa said. She believes it could eventually evolve into a guided autonomous indoor service robot. Another highlight was AURABot, a prototype aimed at tackling floating waste and invasive weeds choking water bodies.

For Nihaal Yousuf, a 2022 electrical engineering graduate from Ilahia College, Muvattupuzha, the idea began at home in Erattupetta. “During hill collapses and landslides, massive amounts of plastic waste get washed into our river, lingering until heavy rains flush them out,” Nihaal recalled. “I wanted to build a robot that could collect floating plastic and pull it ashore.”

The team was later encouraged to test the idea on a heavily weed-choked municipal pond in Kalamassery. But the pond presented a problem far more complicated than simply removing weeds. “The pond is blanketed in algae and water weeds, preventing sunlight from reaching the bed and creating a toxic layer of hydrogen sulfide,” Nihaal said.

An earlier cleaning attempt had shown what could go wrong. When the surface cover was abruptly removed, a chemical reaction depleted dissolved oxygen and fish died. “We realised we couldn’t just drop a motorised prototype in without consulting marine scientists from CUSAT,” Nihaal said.

The team therefore built a 60-cm proof-of-concept using locally sourced PVC pipes. The complete design was also open-sourced on GitHub so others can replicate it.

Making hardware accessible
Unlike software projects, where a prototype can sometimes be built with a laptop and a few lines of code, hardware demands components, tools and fabrication facilities, often beyond a student’s budget. “People do plenty of things in software, but hardly anyone dives into electronics or hardware because components are genuinely expensive,” said Muhammed Shaan, Space Manager at TinkerSpace.

“Through Circuit Digest’s funding and our donated components from past initiatives, we provided the parts, 3D printers, and compute stations completely free. Participants didn’t buy anything pre-built, even the aquarium glass was cut directly from a local factory,” he said.

Participants travelled by train every weekend from Thrissur, Thiruvananthapuram and Kannur to Kalamassery. With guidance from mentors, they worked on everything from mechanical packaging and enclosure modelling to custom PCB fabrication.

The other projects ranged from space technology to robots designed for everyday problems.

Cubaffle was a compact device designed for small CubeSats. It can extend outward by 8 cm to protect a satellite’s star-tracking camera from the Sun’s glare.

MARS, a small modular rover, can be fitted with different tools depending on the job. The team explored using it to detect dangerous gases during disasters and even to deliver parcels after scanning QR codes.

WatchWing was a self-flying aircraft equipped with GPS and communication systems, while ResQmesh explored using a group of small drones to create an emergency communication network when mobile towers are unavailable.

FIORA & OpenMove brought robots into more familiar settings. One was a warehouse rover that could be controlled remotely through Telegram, while the other was a robotic chessboard that could move the pieces on its own.

MOMO AI was designed as a tabletop companion for people with memory problems, helping them with cognitive recall. Meanwhile, InfiniteInferno was a small drone designed to follow its user around.

The 10-week residency may be over, but the prototypes are not necessarily finished. TinkerHub plans to support the builders through incubation, startup grants and competition mentorship.