gopalakrishna

It's that time of the year again when IIT Mumbai hosts Yantriki, a 'robotics' festival where undergrads from engineering colleges across India are invited to build robots and pit their creations against each other's in a game that tests the machines to the limit.
As I walk into the foyer on a hot Sunday morning, the 12 machines that have made it to the quarter finals are engaged in a water polo match. There's a big crowd screaming hysterically, cheering on their favourites as the machines slug it out. Water polo has been introduced this year to take the robotics challenge to a new level of complexity. Creating robots that can navigate in water is far tougher than building machines that are mere landlubbers. The task involves factoring in things like maintaining the centre of gravity in water, that the machines don't sink...
The challenge is tougher because the participants are working on a shoe-string budget. Many machines on display are elementary, but that's missing the point. It's all about an old-fashioned virtue called ingenuity, where students test everything they've learnt in textbooks. Gears made of combs, wheels constructed from old bottle caps, bodies fabricated out of waste cardboard and used packaging material. About the only concessions made to hi-tech are computers dragged from wherever they belong and strewn all over the place in a maze of circuits. The most expensive robots still cost below Rs 10,000 to put together. The organisers are spending barely Rs 7 lakh to hold the show. The contest has two parts: participants can either enter the water polo contest to win a prize or just participate in the fair by displaying their creations.
The favourite in the tank is Metal Shark II. It is a fancy contraption built by Sachitanant Malwekar, a first-year engineering student at Fr Agnel's-Ashram. Malwekar's machine has got a fully automatic controller with a one-touch command. It can be manually programmed and follow any kind of path -- a hyperbolic one, for instance. The bottomline for Malwekar, however, is simple. Win the contest, and he eventually does. That's the reason why Shark was built.
But before Malwekar can take home the prize, his robot has to contend with some stiff challengers -- Mermaid, Ultimate Warrior.... They can't match Metal Shark II in features -- but they've their strategies worked out. A favourite tack: block the favourite's path to the goal post. Malwekar's machine is geared to take that in its stride. Not just that, he's tested Metal Shark II at home for 48 hours in a water tank with hydrochloric acid. "Someone may introduce acid into the system to corrode my engine. I've to be prepared for that," he says matter-of-factly.
Malwekar isn't thinking about anything other than winning today though he thinks his experiments will help someday. Perhaps, the differential drive that has gone into Metal Shark II can be scaled up. His efforts to make sure that it works well in water may provide him with insights on how to reduce resistance in ships. And the robot's control panel, with some tinkering, can evolve into an industrial controller.
Metal Shark II cost Rs 7,000 to put together. So, where does an 18-year-old get that kind of money? He built an intelligent air-conditioner temperature controller with 10 channels for Johnson & Johnson. It's a system that monitors the temperature around the compressors and alerts systems if something goes wrong. And he built a similar system for Godrej. Both gadgets cost him Rs 750, and he got Rs 7,000 for his efforts. "The cost of my labour," he admits sheepishly.
Walk around the lawns and you spot Vivek Vaid, research engineer at IIT Mumbai. The rather shy inventor is exhibiting a blue robot, which is not participating in the water polo challenge. It's a fairly intelligent creature designed to find its way around a maze of obstacles. What Vaid's robot does is to find the best path in a natural environment. For instance, place a chair in its path and it will recognise it as an obstacle and scan the environment to figure out whether turning right or left is a better option.
Vaid used the principles of basic neural networking to build the robot. He replicated five neurons and implemented these in a micro-controller, which, he says, was the hardest part. He admits it's a simple gadget given the kind of work that's taking place in the world outside. But on a budget of Rs 4,500, there's only so much that you can do. His final goal? Research into artificial intelligence. That his robot may be able to serve somebody soup by avoiding obstacles on the way like people in the corridors in an unknown environment.
While most neural networks are simulated on high-end computers, Vaid's work is at the lower end as he works on micro-controllers. It means his robot's got limited memory and computing power. This doesn't let the machine do floating-point math. Dejargonised, it means the robot can make computations only of the type 3*1. When it comes to 3.2*1, the gadget gets flummoxed. But the point is, a start has been made.
There are other interesting exhibits here. Like a surveillance vehicle built by a team from Pune. It's got a built-in camera mounted on a remote-controlled vehicle designed to take on difficult terrain that human beings can't reach. The camera sends back images to a monitor installed in a control room from where it can be manipulated. The gadgets on display differ in degrees of complexity. The simplest exercise involves bringing in pre-fabricated robotic arms from the departments where they are housed. These arms are then programmed by students on their PCs to demonstrate to the uninitiated the potential of robotics.
The most ambitious participant in the water polo match lies in a state of disarray an hour before the show. The creators, from a regional engineering college in Pune, wear a resigned look. The team leader, Kartik Babu, toggles listlessly on his computer shifting effortlessly from C++ to Doom. His robot, unlike Metal Shark II, was designed to play the game on its own once placed in the tank. Like Vaid's blue robot, it is designed to look around for obstacles, identify the task on hand and deposit the plastic balls in the goal post even as it moves past the competition. But something has gone wrong. He doesn't quite know what.
Sure, what's on display here isn't exactly rocket science. Most contraptions aren't even strictly robots. Going by the textbooks, they won't qualify till they display some degree of intelligence. Hence, Metal Shark II doesn't qualify as it's manually-controlled. Vaid's blue robot does as it's built to find its way without help.
But the fair is gaining in importance because it's creating a forum and stimulating interest in creating original machines. And providing a ripe hunting ground for firms looking for fresh talent. Satyam-GE's India Design Centre has a strategically placed stall. Then there is Altair -- a company that builds CAD/ CAM software used in high-end applications like avionics. Its engineers are moving around making presentations.
That apart, the affair is a predominantly student-driven with a single thought being echoed by most people there. That these efforts will translate in the near future into a renewed interest in robotics. For a long time, experiments have been confined to the departments of mechanical engineering in isolated pockets like the IITs across India. There has been no sustained effort or money pumped into developing the discipline. Quite evident from the fact that none of the robots have been funded by the colleges where these students come from.
But there are signs of change. As a student points out, unlike in the past, it is not just the mechanical engineers who are pottering around the exhibits. There are those in computing, electronics, and biology taking a close look at what's possible and what's not. Pretty much like trends abroad. But how far can the Indian robot creators go? Last year's winning team, Dixie Dynamite, went on to win the sweepstakes at a global robotics exhibition in Florida. It is now studying in a college in the US.