A battle of robots, where everyone wins

  • | Thursday | 23rd March, 2017

Here too, at the DKTE Society’s Textile and Engineering Institute, students surveyed manufacturing facilities in the area and are now attempting to automate the process. “We churn out a million engineers every year,” Prof. Arya says, “but they’ve never done anything practical in their lives. Beyond theoryThe idea of the kit took shape during a distance education programme Prof. Arya taught; he found it difficult to teach outside a laboratory. “We want to take this to 500,” says Prof. Arya. Prof. Arya is pleased that the project has reached even the remotest parts of the country.

more-in As it seems to do almost every year, tragedy hit Sivakasi in Tamil Nadu on March 11. A blast at a private fireworks unit claimed the lives of five workers. One of the causes: rising heat in the shed. In the town’s Mepco Schlenk Engineering College, a team of mechanical engineering and nanoscience students and their teachers are attempting to change the material inside the crackers, making them less susceptible to sudden explosions, and designing a temperature monitor . “In six months to a year, we should have the product ready,” says Dr. Shantha Selva Kumari, Senior Professor & head, Department of ECE at the institute. In Ichalkaranji, a textile town in Maharashtra, the picking and placing of yarn on spindles is done manually. Here too, at the DKTE Society’s Textile and Engineering Institute, students surveyed manufacturing facilities in the area and are now attempting to automate the process. “We have a prototype ready; we will now enhance it for commercial use,” says Dr. D.V. Kodavade, Professor & Head, Computer Science & Engineering Department at the institute. Sivakasi and Ichalkaranji have no history of being centres of innovation in engineering. But these students, and others like them in unstoried towns across India are quietly leading change in their areas, tweaking processes, making the lives of local people easier. The impetus for efforts like these comes from an annual competition at the premier Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT-B). This year, 33 teams have made it to the finals of the e-Yantra Robotics Competition (eYRC) at the IIT-B campus on March 24 and 25. They will compete to develop indigenous solutions, using robotics, on five themes related to space exploration. The finalists get support for travel and stay, and invitations to six-week paid summer internships at IIT-B; the internships include 24x7 access to labs, project work under individual mentors, and workshops by experts on a variety of topics, not all of them technology-related (like heritage treks, theatre, and sessions on grooming with a former Miss India). Practicals make perfect eYRC began five years ago. From 4,384 students who registered in 2012, the number is up to 22,608 in the current cycle. Past themes have included automation, urban services, agriculture, smart services. It is sponsored by the Ministry of Human Resource Development’s National Mission for Education through ICT, to promote robotics-enhanced education. But as Kavi Arya, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT-B and one of the driving forces of the project, says, “e-Yantra is more than robotics. It is, if you like, a vaahan [vehicle] to reach out to students. The real message is much deeper: it is about empowerment, project-based learning, having pride and perfection in work, breaking down a problem, greater self-esteem.” Rather than requiring teams to build robots from scratch — which costs money, time and effort, and tends to result in crude robots — the competition gives qualifying teams a kit robot (called the e-Yantra robot) and accessories, and asks them to adapt it based on the assigned theme. Teams get help implementing their project at every step. Beyond theory The idea of the kit took shape during a distance education programme Prof. Arya taught; he found it difficult to teach outside a laboratory. “So we thought of a ‘lab in a box.’ This guy can unwrap the box, do all the assignments and learn the building of embedded systems. That’s the basis for the e-Yantra project.” A related issue. India’s growing economy has huge demand for engineering and the things it creates, which can only be met in a scalable way if you have automation, the ‘Internet of Things,’ robots. And the engineers to build these things. “We churn out a million engineers every year,” Prof. Arya says, “but they’ve never done anything practical in their lives. They don’t have access to labs, to guidance.” The entire programme is designed to bridge these gaps. What e-Yantra wants to do is, in the smallest of districts, create the kind of people who can look at a problem, and rather than figure out what technology to buy, instead build a machine and figure out how to take it to market. Prof. Arya is pleased that the project has reached even the remotest parts of the country. At the Islamic University of Science and Technology, on the outskirts of Srinagar, he says, “They were saying, ‘It’s wonderful you guys have come, it’s great that the Indian government is taking interest in us!’ We found the Srinagar kids extremely bright. But it’s a tragedy that there are no jobs there.” Seeding change After the competition ends, students get to give the robotic kits to their colleges, to seed new robotics labs. But that’s not all IIT-B is doing. Under the e-Yantra Lab Setup Initiative (eLSI), IIT-B encourages colleges to set up Embedded Systems and Robotics facilities, and it trains teachers to use them. IIT-B invites several colleges in a region to set up a nodal centre. A proactive college is asked to assume the role of a coordinator for a principals’ meet where officials/teachers from all the colleges in the vicinity are invited. Interested colleges sign a Letter of Intent committing four teachers and funds to procure equipment for their lab. e-Yantra conducts a two-day workshop for the teachers, who then participate in task-based training (TBT). They get an e-Yantra robot and accessories to create solutions to a set of experiments. e-Yantra also conducts a TBT Challenge, and gives out prizes, and supports teams through a helpdesk and online forum. At least 233 colleges inaugurated their labs in 2016, and another 33 are in the pipeline. “We want to take this to 500,” says Prof. Arya. “Even if the project fails, we would have changed the culture in those places.” Every eLSI college is given an opportunity to participate in a e-Yantra Ideas Competition, a platform to showcase projects using the equipment from their e-Yantra labs. Each college registers up to four ideas; teachers mentor small student teams, proposals are shortlisted, then teams make prototypes. Selected projects make it to regional finals, and winners get trips to the e-Yantra symposium at the IIT-B campus (on April 7 and 8). What next? e-Yantra wants to involve faculty from other disciplines at IIT-B, since many problems need multi-disciplinary problem-solving skills. Prof. Arya is also trying to figure out how to start engaging the industry better: “All I want is for them to open the doors to these kids, to come and see their problems.” For now, if it injects a huge dose of self-belief in the participants — so many of whom from small towns and remote areas with little opportunity — Prof. Arya will feel vindicated. Perhaps the best testimonials to that come from the participating institutes. Dr. G. Radhamani, Professor and Director, Department of Computer Science, at the Dr. G R Damodaran College of Science, Coimbatore, says she often has to fight to keep students away from the e-Yantra lab. Her students — and she — are doubly excited as their institute is host for the regional finals, and is the only non-engineering institute to have a lab and participate in the competition. “The students have gained a lot of confidence by just working on the project, and accessing the online learning materials. They often come up to me and excitedly and say they’ve learnt something new. I’m sure some of them will go on to find exciting careers in robotics.” Past teams offered praise. The team from the JK Institute of Applied Physics & Technology, Uttar Pradesh, says that e-Yantra is “building India; to generate all your innovations in your mind.” They also had some tips for participants: “Don’t lose hope if you fail or your ’bot fails. Take some time, keep cool and try again. It’ll get better.” The students of KLS Gogte Institute of Technology, Belagavi, Karnataka, also offer reassurance to competitors. In the beginning they say, they had no clue as to how robots worked, and “thought they were made by gods and geniuses.” Now they feel its child’s play, with all that’s needed is to “look at the instructions and make a robot do tasks.” And really, that’s all there is to it.

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