Failures

This section lists some of my most prominent failures

Lost the prestigious first place in Robo-beats competition by a single point

[LOSS OF FOCUS, OVERCONFIDENCE]
  • Entered the semi-finals and finals of an intercollegiate robotics competition organized by my undergraduate School, D.J.Sanghvi College of Engg.
  • After leading against the opponent team for a series of rounds, a key component within our robotic contraption failed to perform and we lost in the last round, with an overall score loss by just a single point
  • When we entered the competition, we(our team) never knew we could even make it to the finals. However, when we did enter the finals, our expectations started to raise higher and we started to play, not to enjoy, but to perform. We became overconfident with our performance and we overlooked the probability of failure. Moreover, the opponent's robot was from another college and hence all eyes were set on our performance as we represented the host team. Probably, if we would have continued to play with a focused approach only for the sake of playing, we would have still won.
  • Not much of a huge failure to teach great things, but it was now when I had first hand experience in realizing that our actions, and not results are under our control. It also taught us that failure is inevitable as soon as you loose focus on your own actions.

Disastrous failure in TechFest 2006, Robotics Competition

[OVERSTRESS; FAIL TO PLAN, PLAN TO FAIL]
  • After spending days and sleepless nights, we had come up with a high speed, maneuverable IC engine based mini-racing robot to enter the "full throttle" competition in TechFest 2006, IIT Bombay's international robotics competition.
  • We cleared the round of basic elimination. In the first round of competition, our wireless communication systems interfered with the microphones of the event organizers and our racing robot went into an erratic path.
  • We had spent time and efforts to make the robot fast, but overlooked a key component, which could fail. This project cost all the team members quite dearly. However, the things we learned during all those sleepless nights that we spent in the machine shop clearly outweighed this cost.
  • We spent too much time on the robot, rather than planning the project strategically. We were acting as technicians to create a contraption. This experience pointed out that not just efforts, but a strategic plan of action always helps to succeed. Had we not overstressed ourselves, we could have acknowledged the problem and come up with a novel solution.