The most interesting thing I saw at BSX wasn't a rocket. It was how familiar pieces of engineering suddenly looked different once they were part of a system built for space.
Our Mars rover has spent months on a lab floor at Vellore Institute of Technology , being some version of "working." Representing Team Vyadh at Bengaluru Space Expo 2026 meant putting it in front of people for whom "working" has a much higher bar.
I found myself discussing things I normally spend my time working on in the lab: PID tuning on our robotic arm joints, encoder feedback, motor control, system architecture and CAN communication. Talking about these with engineers and scientists was different from debugging them with my teammates. They made me think less about whether a subsystem works and more about what it would take for that subsystem to keep working when the environment, the reliability requirements, and the consequences all become real.
That distinction stayed with me. There’s a real difference between a prototype that can move an arm and a rover meant for Mars, which has to move that arm reliably, repeatedly, autonomously, in an environment we cannot simply walk over to and fix.
Conversations with scientists from ISRO - Indian Space Research Organization and IN-SPACe , including Dr. Vinod Kumar, FIE, FIETE, presenting our rover to Air Vice Marshal Dharmendra Singh Dangi, VSM,Indian Air Force gave me a better sense of how that gap is approached.
Meeting Mr.Pawan Kumar Chandana , Co-founder & CEO of Skyroot Aerospace and professionals from companies like Accio Robotics,Hindustan Aeronautics Limited,Dhruva Space, Lattice Semiconductor ,Ati Robotics was another reminder of how the same curiosity to build can eventually turn into something that reaches space.
Not by making one giant leap.
By asking better questions about every subsystem: the sensing, feedback, control, communication, fault handling, autonomy, mechanical design, and eventually the testing required to trust the whole system.
That was what made seeing the 7-DoF robotic manipulator proposed for the Bharatiya Antariksh Station so striking. I had spent years seeing rack-and-pinion mechanisms mostly in textbooks. Here, I was looking at the same basic mechanical principle being used inside a space-system concept, in a gripper designed for a completely different level of operation.
Suddenly, our prototype felt less like a finished project and more like the first page of a much longer engineering problem.
I walked into BSX as a curious student looking for answers.
I left with a clearer idea of what I need to build next, and far more questions about what it would take to actually build a rover for Mars.
Grateful to Bengaluru Space Expo for this opportunity!
#BSX2026 #SpaceRobotics #MarsRover #Robotics #SpaceTech #EmbeddedSystems
