Guwahati:

The students at IIT Guwahati campus continued their protests on Tuesday, boycotting classes for the second straight day over the alleged suicide by a student on Sunday night.

Thousands of students had staged a protest on Monday as well against the student’s death, demanding justice and accountability.

The third-year student of computer engineering was found dead in his room at the Brahmaputra hostel. This is the second incident in a month and the fourth death in IIT Guwahati this year.

Today, the students organised a candlelight vigil at the campus in his memory.

Later, they held protests and sat with the authorities for an open house discussion which remained inconclusive, sources from IIT Guwahati told NDTV.

Sources also said the students are demanding resignations of some faculty members, who, they allege, have been causing many of them “mental trauma”.

NDTV has sent queries to IIT Guwahati on allegations made by the protesting students. The institute is yet to respond.

The students have decided to continue with their protests, and even threatened to boycott the coming exams.

Professor Devendra Jalihal, Director of IIT Guwahati, has however, assured students that their demands will be looked into and appealed them to resume their classes.

Mumbai:

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) have uncovered how animals find their way back home without getting lost or being late by using a robot that mimics their movements.

This robot is designed to move on its own, much like an animal finding food and then to use light as a guide to return home (homing), the IIT Bombay said in a statement on Tuesday.

In a new study, researchers from the department of physics have used this robot to study the underlying principles of homing by animals.

“The primary goal of our research group was to understand the physics of active and living systems. We achieve this by performing experiments on centimetres-sized self-propelled programmable robots. In simple words, we model these robots to mimic the dynamics of living organisms, both at the individual and collective levels,” Dr Nitin Kumar, an assistant professor at the department of physics, IIT Bombay, said.

For their study, the researchers wanted to determine the time it took for the robot to return home, with increasing amounts of deviations from its homing path.

It was observed that the reorientation rate, the frequency at which the robot (or an animal) should adjust its direction for successful homing, originated from the degree of randomness in its path.

The researchers discovered an ‘optimal reorientation rate’ for a particular value of randomness beyond which the adverse effects of increased randomness are negated by more frequent reorientations, ultimately ensuring successful homing.

This suggested animals might have evolved to reorient themselves at an optimal rate to efficiently find their way home, regardless of the noise or unpredictability in their environment.

“The observation of a finite upper limit on return times indicates that the homing motion is inherently efficient. Our results demonstrated that if animals are always aware of the direction of their home and always correct their course whenever they deviate from the intended direction, they will surely get home within a finite time,” Kumar added.

Apart from physical experiments, the researchers also ran computer simulations where the robot’s movement mimicked animals.

This virtual robot combines active Brownian motion (the random motion of particles in a liquid or gas, caused by collisions with fast-moving atoms or molecules in the fluid) with occasional resets to its orientation to correct its course back towards home.

These simulations matched the experimental results, reinforcing the idea that randomness and reorientation work hand-in-hand to optimise homing.

“When we applied this model to the trajectories of a real biological system of a flock of homing pigeons, it showed a good agreement with our theory, validating our hypothesis of enhanced efficiency due to frequent course corrections,” Mr Kumar said.

He said in real and more complex systems, the homing cues might be more complicated than a simple uniform gradient towards home, as modelled in this experiment.

“In our future research, we aim to model these scenarios in our experiment by using a combination of spatiotemporal variations in light intensity and physical obstacles,” the assistant professor added.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

The 18th G20 Summit will be held at the newly built Bharat Mandapam at Pragati Maidan in New Delhi next week. Authorities in the national capital have been making extensive arrangements to welcome delegates from across the world that will include over 25 heads of state and global institution leaders.

To ensure the smooth functioning of the summit, Delhi Police has also issued orders for the movement of the Delhi Metro. The gates of some metro stations will remain closed due to security reasons from September 8 to 10 when India will be hosting the G20 Summit. 

According to the order issued by the police, traffic will be completely shut off at Moti Bagh, Bhikaji Cama Place, Munirka, RK Puram, IIT, and Sadar Bazar Cantonment metro stations. Passengers can neither enter nor exit these metro stations.

Meanwhile, the police have kept Dhaula Kuan, Khan Market, Janpath, Supreme Court, and Bhikaji Cama Place metro stations on the list of sensitive places. Along with this, the Supreme Court Metro Station, the nearest station to the venue, will remain completely closed. 

Other than the specified gates, the Delhi Metro will continue to operate normally.

Passengers going towards the Delhi airport from the night of the 7th to the evening of the 11th of September have been advised to use the metro.

Earlier, the Delhi Metro announced that they will be selling ‘Tourist Smart Cards’ through dedicated counters at 36 stations from September 4-13. 

These ‘Tourist Smart Cards’ are available on regular days too, but in view of the G20 Summit, dedicated counters have been opened which would start selling these cards for a period of 10 days starting Monday, a senior official said. 

The 36 stations where these cards will be sold through dedicated counters include — Kashmere Gate, Chandni Chowk, Chawri Bazar, New Delhi, Rajiv Chowk, Patel Chowk, Central Secretariat, Udyog Bhawan, Lok Kalyan Marg and Supreme Court metro stations. 

Meanwhile, Delhi traffic police have also released a detailed advisory on the traffic movement in the national capital. The official statement revealed that all traffic restrictions will come into effect from the night of September 7 and remain in place till September 11.