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Imagine a car that doesn't require you to turn the steering wheel, and instead, allows you to simply tap on it to indicate the direction you want the car to take. IIT Bombay Assistant Professor Shashikanth Suryanarayanan, of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, has achieved just that by designing the country's first steer-by-wire technology in a Mahindra Scorpio car.

"Steer-by-wire is characterised by the absence of mechanical linkages between the road-wheels and the hand-wheel. It is a known technology in the West. The wheels are electronically connected, designed on the principle of mecatronics. In simpler words, the system minimises the driver's efforts by separating decision making from the actual job of doing the work," explains the 32-year-old professor.

The 2006 invention received immense accolades and has been now nominated for the TR-35 awards by the MIT's Technology Review.

A Bachelor of Technology from IIT Madras in 1998, and a PhD from the University of California in 2002, Suryanarayanan is unassuming about his work. "When I was in the US, I, along with a team, designed such cars and other large vehicles and ran them between Los Angeles and San Diego. In the West, several off-road vehicles like tractors and road-rollers use the steer-by-wire system. However, a legislation needs to come into place the world over to use the system on the road," he says.

Returning to India in 2004, Suryanarayanan duplicated the steer-by-wire model in a Mahindra Scorpio, with funding from Sona Koyo Steering Systems. "That was just a trial and I used to run the vehicle on the IIT campus roads back then. Today the car is parked in my garage, a guinea pig for experiments by my students," he laughs.

More recently, Suryanarayanan has designed, developed and tested an indigenous low-cost engine management system (EMS) supporting port fuel-injection operation for petrol-powered small vehicles and three-wheelers. A vehicle fitted with this solution, he says, produced less hydrocarbon, carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide emissions when compared to a carburetion solution. "Test results also indicated that the EMS could better the fuel economy performance of a carburetion solution," he adds.

Recently, Suryanarayanan, along with 25 partners, launched SEDEMAC Mechatronics, a technology-driven private limited company, as an on-campus incubator venture of IIT Bombay. He hopes to see his technology on the road some day.