Soumya Ranjan Sahoo’s genes for playing with electrical devices came early in life. As a six-year-old growing up in Rourkela, he tried to put a wire in live and neutral points of the plug. What followed was a disaster— and a reprimand by his parents.

This did not deter him from experimenting again.

And a few years later, his sister joined him in the ‘electrical innovations’. The duo dismantled a 40-year-old radio of their grandfather to see what was beneath the classic veneer, and they could get hold of the capacitor. For him, this was an ‘academic celebration’.

He credits his mother for leaning towards Maths and Physics. A homemaker, his mother would sit with and tutor him on the fundamentals. His father, who worked in Rourkela Steel Plant, helped him understand finance and economics. In the 11th grade, he opted for Physics, Chemistry, Maths, and Biology. There was no parental pressure on him, but meanwhile, he started nurturing a dream to become a doctor and even wrote the exam for medicine. Life had other plans for him.

He joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at UCE, Burla (now VSSUT Burla), in 2004. The four-year curriculum strengthened his fundamentals on circuit network theory, signal processing, control engineering, power plant designs, power system protection, and some notions of high voltage engineering.

One thing was clear by this time—he wanted to dive deep into academics.

So, despite an offer from Tata Power, Soumya joined IIT Bombay for an M. Tech in the Interdisciplinary Programme on Systems and Control engineering (now a centre). After a broad study on the Multiagent System, which entails making the robots work in collaboration, he decided to do a dual M.Tech and PhD degree in the same subject.

In late 2013, he defended his doctoral thesis. It was in the same year that he married a girl he had known since his nursery days. Interestingly, the couple shares the same first name.

Autonomous vehicle systems benefit from cooperation in tasks like search and rescue, monitoring, and security. A team of autonomous vehicles can offer robustness, efficiency, and reduced costs in such tasks. His doctoral work focused on designing control algorithms using minimal data and coarse actuation to achieve rendezvous and velocity alignment.

After a month of his PhD defense, he joined the Flight Mechanics and Control Division of the National Aerospace Laboratory, Bangalore in January 2014. His work focused on making 3 fixed-wing UAVs fly together. However, he wanted to go deeper into academics.

Diverse Designs

Prof Sahoo joined IITK in June 2014 and continued his research towards developing algorithms primarily for formation control in multi-agent systems in various scenarios. Later, the study also diversified to analysing the effect of delay in communication and input that can be present in such systems.

“We focused on in-house fabrication and control algorithm design for quadcopters, specifically tilt-rotor quadcopters, wherein the vehicle's rotors can be tilted. Following this idea, we explored the development of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) with tiltable tunnel thrusters,” he says.

Moving ahead

And what is the broader vision of his research study?

The team, he says, is working towards a more refined and well-engineered prototype of the same so that it can be adapted for use in agriculture, assistance in firefighting, disaster management, and other fields.

The work on the AUV with tiltable thrusters is in progress. This will be taken forward to develop a prototype which will be tested in riverine and marine conditions. Such a vehicle will be useful in underwater studies, inspections, and other data collection activities. The research team has also sketched out a plan to develop a robotic manipulator with a dexterous end-effector, which will allow faster manipulation of objects.

Prof Sahoo’s lab has also focused on applying the notion of multi-agent systems to microgrids (both AC and DC). The work focuses on coordinating the flow of electric power from various distributed energy sources like solar photovoltaics, battery energy storage systems, and local conventional sources to the loads. In the course of time, a DC microgrid setup has been developed in-house, where the developed algorithms for a DC microgrid can be verified.

“The broader goal is to develop a functional prototype that can contribute to Make in India,” he maintains.

His therapeutic recipe—travelling with family and occasionally listening to music.