 Good afternoon dear participants, I hope you have completed your lab assignment and have assembled back into the classrooms. This is an extra hour. We realize that we have some additional useful things to share with you. So I had requested in fact a couple of my colleagues to organize special talks. The first one to have agreed is my colleague Professor Kavi Arya. He is an expert in embedded systems, in fact he drives much of our robotic activities and his penchant is to use these robos as sort of learning equipment. So he is going to talk to us about Robo Enhanced Teaching today. I am very thankful to him for sort of adding value to this workshop. One natural question which might arise in your minds is that in an ISD workshop on databases why are we talking about robos? So let me tell you why I think two important reasons why I think this and this kind of talk are important. First of all while traditionally the databases are supposed to be residing on your regular servers containing data mostly concerning the businesses such as banks or manufacturing industry or whatever increasingly that facet is not true. In fact not only in IIT but at many other places there has been work going on on one side very large databases but on the other side micro databases. You would have heard of for example microchips called smart cards. There has been a lot of activity on smart card databases which will hold variety of useful information for individuals. In fact the unique ID program of the country through its various agencies, user agencies expect to give smart cards to every Indian eventually which will hold not only the pertinent information about user ID but many of these cards when used for financial transactions could hold small databases pertaining to the financial information of the individual. Clearly databases encompass the whole world from micro to macro. Additionally if you notice the spread of information technology in the human society which started with mainframes which continued with the onslaught of small servers which continued further with the onslaught of PCs and laptops which we use is actually continuing in a exponentially increasing fashion through embedded systems. We see these embedded systems every now and then in the real world whether it's a washing machine, whether it's a TV, whether it's a small digital watch on your hand practically everything has a processor, has memory and now increasingly these fellows will have databases. It is important therefore that we are able to connect our knowledge of the exciting field of databases with what are the possibilities with other associated dimensions of ID most importantly the embedded system dimension. The second reason why I think this talk is pertinent is because we are going to see Kavyaari is going to share with us how robots can be used for enhanced teaching. There are in fact attempts here on setting up virtual laboratories, setting up a collaborative learning environment where small robots would be in the hands of participants at remote places and talks and lectures could be conducted from one place where experiments could be done at various places very plumbly falling in the domain of the kind of workshops that we are conducting. So I am happy to welcome Professor Kavyaari here. Thank you Kavyaari, thank you for agreeing to give this talk. I'll just give a brief introduction. Professor Kavyaari did his bachelor's in England and did his PhD from Oxford and worked in the coveted IBM research lab for some time before he came back to India. He was actually working with Tata Research and Development Centre at Pune for quite some time before some of us could sort of lure him to come back to academics. He has been with the School of IT for many years and now with the Merge Department of Computer Science and Engineering and spearheads our activities in the embedded systems specifically on the robotic side. So thank you very much Kavi, all yours. Thank you. Okay, where should I start? Thank you for a very apt introduction to the relevance of this embedded systems talk. You have provided the very important link into what I am going to speak about today. This is very right. There are so many ways to motivate this talk. For instance, I will give you a totally different way of looking at things as to why it is important that we study this area. Robots and embedded systems are basically computers inside devices. Typically, these used to be single functional and the computers used to be very small with very small memories and stuff like that. But now what you used to have in a mainframe in the old days, you are getting on a phone and now as embedded intelligence if you like, even in things like room cleaning robots and other kind of robots that you get. So it is extremely important given the kind of scenarios that we anticipate in the future that we study this area of embedded systems and robotics. Robots and robotics has been cloaked in very, very high tech vineers if you like in the past. But actually, they can range from the very, very simple devices to very, very complex devices. So I will share with you a bit of the excitement that we have here. So I teach a subject called embedded systems and two flavors of this run at IIT Bombay at the same time. In the electrical engineering department, we have this subject taught as building things out of microcontrollers. And in the computer science department, we teach given things, how do you program it? So we call it embedded systems software where we teach a software centric view of an embedded system. So we talk about the vocabulary of embedded systems. We talk about how different they are from conventional systems and the sorts of software that you need, the real-time operating systems that you need, the theory that goes into it and new languages like model-based design languages like Esterel, Luster and Skade to build these kind of systems. So what I am going to share with you here is something much more specific. We have a project from the MHRD called E Yantra where what we have done is we found it very useful to develop an educational robot through which we have taught embedded systems over the last five years. So we have kind of evolved these robots and the robots are now at a point that we can actually deploy them in engineering colleges. So you can think about how to incorporate them in your curriculum, whatever you teach. I will give you an example where there is a pressing need for devices like that. Typically many B engineering students in the final year want to do a project and they are very hard pressed for ideas. Many of them I found in engineering colleges want to do a project with robots and robotics. And they find that first of all robots are not available in the market. If they are available they are too expensive and they are imported robots which if you buy there is no support. And if anything breaks you had it and it is too expensive and the next year nobody has got any robots. So typically what they do is that they go about building their own robot and they buy components of the market, build the robot and say that okay fine I will do a project after I build this robot. And they find that by the time the time is up the robot is half built or it is a very cluesy robot and they just write up the report and go away. And next year another student comes wants to do a project in robotics and does exactly the same thing. So you are not able to go beyond that. So what we have done now is that we thought we were creating a robot but what we have actually tried to create is an ecosystem. That means once we put these robots out you should be able to service them, maintain them, buy us pay parts and all that. And we tried to create the entire environment and we have tried to make these robots available at a low cost. So we have licensed these robots to manufacturers outside and the entire design of our robots is open source. So it is up to you to take it and refine it and improve it and so on. So let me get on with the talk and the overview of the talk is this. I shall talk a little bit about the E. Y. Anthra project. Our vision is we want to create engineers who can build complex machines okay that sounds vague. But typically problems in life when you get them don't compartmentalize themselves you know. They don't say I am a database problem, I am a real time systems problem, I am this problem or that problem is just a problem that you need to solve right. And increasingly we find that the most interesting problems are multidisciplinary. That means they don't fall into one domain. Like for instance increasingly we see all these devices around us right. Like for instance an iPod and an iPad and all these kind of things. These were not built by someone saying I want an iPad and this is the specs of it. Now you go away and design me the hardware and you software guys you build the software for this. That's not how it works. It's a team activity. You have the algorithm experts, you have the battery technology experts, you have the display technology experts, manufacturing technology experts, Steve Job's there saying that look this is what I want. So he comes up with this is what I want. It should be this size. This is what I should be able to do about it. And you guys you tell me what I can do right and they sit down and negotiate. Because if for instance he says I want an 8 hour battery life right. You have the choice between putting a very big battery which will make the device very, very bulky or you can make the algorithm right. All the codecs and all that inside much more clever. So they consume less battery. So there are lots of compromises that need to be played out between these engineers. And typically they design these kind of products by sitting across a table and negotiating right what will be the impact of this compromise and so on. So the mindset required to build these kind of products is very different from the typical mindset of an engineer who just is doing some software development and things like that. So this is what we want to create a kind of a tinkerer who can think about needs in the marketplace and they can think of some automation to answer that need. And to build that technology they will need databases, real-time systems or whatever it is and produce a product to put out there in the marketplace right. So we will talk a bit about the Iyantra program. We have a core team at the moment led by our program manager Maltibaru. We have someone in admin and a workshop team. So I will talk a little bit about these workshops that we do. And we have an educational robot that we've developed which has been licensed out and it's available online on the net and we will go into more details. So this is the motivation, this slide. I typically start my embedded systems class with this slide right. So these are metaphorical indicators for various disciplines. Like for instance you have a microscope here which refers to a pathology and medicine science and things like that handcuffs for forensic applications, military applications. There is a tank here, consumer appliances, there is a kettle here, ships, there is a boat here, music, there is a guitar and so on. Can you think of which of these areas of our lives do not have an embedded system in it right? I will pause for a moment here. So I will just point out, you have a calculator, you have a house and various things, you have television, you have a dentist here, you have a washing machine, syringe, a telephony, scarecrow in a field, camera, a car, automobile, a saw, traffic lights, a balloon. In which of these fields do embedded systems not occur? So if you think about it a little bit, actually they are in every aspect of our lives. In a car almost 30 to 40 percent of the cost of the car is in the electronics inside a car right. Electronics, steer by wire systems, your engine control unit, your anti-lock braking system, your transmission control unit, especially the higher end cars about 40 percent at least of the cost of a car is in the electronics. And wherever we see electronics, I just see software right, software which is running on some hardware. So this is increasingly as you can see the scope and the size of the entire market of devices which need embedded systems, the programmers right and there is a distinct change which is happening from the use of computers to computers which are embedded everywhere right in your devices, in your clothes, in your appliances and at your workplace, home everything. And there is a complete change in the interaction of these devices, growing number of critical applications and they are infiltrating our lives. So we need to know more about how to look at these things and how to build these things. So that is the basis of our embedded systems course and what we are trying to do is sensitize people to the kind of changes which are happening around them right. Changes, computing without computers, what does that mean? Tremendous changes in how we design and deliver computer power. In the old days you had main frames, a few main frames could do all the jobs that you want. Now computers are everywhere right, you have reconfigurable computing where through just a few commands and in microseconds you can load a new hardware onto an FPGA and get essentially new hardware right. And everything is speeding up because we are turning software into hardware right. And there is no computer there to slow us down anymore. My PhD student Sameer Sasarapudde has just completed a PhD where he takes a C program, you give him a C program and he gives you hardware right. So he converts that C program code if you like into an automaton which he can burn on to an FPGA or you can build an ASIC out of it or what have you. And that totally changes the way you think about software and hardware, the new ways of designing and delivering computer capability right. Like for instance originally we had main frames and we had PCs, now mobile phones right. And increasingly you have the cloud, the network is the computer right. Nobody wants to play around or fiddle around with their PCs and desktop, there is too much of a pain, anti-virus software and the OS and machine becoming slow, why can't we rent out computing power from the cloud as much as we need right. The entire structure of the electronics and the computing industry is changing, now many of you will know the answer to this, who is the largest manufacturer of cameras right. The largest manufacturer of cameras right, some will say Canon, some will say Nikon, some will say what Panasonic, Sony right, but would you know that the largest manufacturer of cameras is actually Nokia at the moment ok, Nokia the number of cameras that you have in the phone that people use as a primary device. And things are changing right, it is changing the products that people buy, the way they buy and use them. Like for instance we had tape recorders, now we have Walkman, then we had digital players, then we had the iPad and iPod and God knows what will come next. Books are becoming redundant with these new iPad like devices right and Kindle from amazon.com and so on. And mainframes are becoming smaller, many computers, PCs, becoming servers and now they are all moving back into the cloud right. And this is all changing how money is made from delivering products to customers, typically electronic products right. In the old days it is physical things which made money, now it is basically vaporware and ideas that make money. In fact a colleague of mine who was the head of marketing in TCS, this is about 6 years ago told me Kavi it is amazing right, in the old days it used to be money which used to make money, now it is ideas that make money right. So we need to think about all these things and we need to consider what our place will be in addressing the kind of challenges that come out of these things right. We need to think about devising products for the local market place. So one challenge we throw to the faculty who visit our workshops here is that we tell them that once we have shown you how to use these robots and we have shown you how you can incorporate it into your curriculum. You must be stimulating students to work on interesting projects. You should look at your industrial catchment area, the industries which are in the vicinity of your college and think of what kind of automation you can build for them right and hatch these as student projects and maybe become a consultant to the local industry in automation and things like that. So these are the kind of changes we are hoping because the society that you are living in is going to distinctly change. In India we might not have the burden of legacy, we can skip several generation of technology to jump into the latest as has happened with mobile phones right. We could never have thought of the of the huge deployment of mobile phones that we have in this country 10 or 20 years ago. I suggest that we look at robotics in a kind of similar way right. Like you find PCs now you are going to find robots now but they would not be like the star wars kind of robots that you see. They will be intelligent little vacuum cleaners, they will be little floor sweepers, they will be dishwashers right. Buys are becoming very expensive you do not get buys anymore right. Do your dishes and to clean your houses and so on and if they come they are very unreliable and increasingly with the better state of education in this country they would not want to be buys anymore or maids and things like that. So you will have to think of automation now much of the automation that comes from abroad is suited to two situations abroad environments abroad they do not suit our requirements right small houses lots of clutter, wetness around, humidity all these kind of things. We need to think of ways to build these kind of devices for our own uses at cost points which suit our requirements and typically we will not be able to import these devices right. So we need to build up these skills so that is what our goal is in this e-anthrop project every child needs to be equipped with this kind of knowledge for the future okay. So here is our object our objective to trigger a robotic revolution right rather grandiose right aim high and you reach somewhere interesting and how do we achieve our goal we share our knowledge and we encourage you to share your knowledge with others. So we have started giving workshops we have covered some 120 colleges where we call two faculty from each of those colleges we train them in the use of the robots we introduce them to all the cost material here we show them how to run run and embedded the systems project and things like this and then we equip them with two robots each and they go back to start exploring and then incrementally I will share with you now how we can have a greater engagement with the colleges. So we design deploy robots for teaching and engineering colleges we conduct workshops for faculty and for students and we partner with more colleges right if we find some enthusiastic faculty in places we would like to partner with them and see what we can do with them we create and encourage you to create open source content based on the robots right which we share with others on our e-anthrop website and then we will our job is to keep on evolving these robots come up with new kind of robots and to and to just make all this whole thing happen typically what happens treat these robots as a pen right the pen is not interesting in itself what is much more interesting is a story that you write with the pen and the story that you write with the pen in this case will require knowledge of artificial intelligence databases real-time systems engineering knowledge engineering skills embedded systems design skills all sorts of skills but typically what happens are students do not have access to this pen in the first place. So this robot that we have is just a pen and at this point let us share with you what this initial robot is this is a robot which we have developed over the last few years and it is reasonably low cost it is 15,000 rupees and is based on an Atmega 2560 processor the design is open source is a reasonably modular and the documentation is very high quality is there on the website for you to download and support through various agencies including a company which manufactures and sells these and is very good for teaching and research and there is lot of software that we built on this robot right. So I will just describe this robot to you it is got 5 proximity sensors which can sense up to 1.5 meters 2 millimeter accuracy right. It is got an LCD display it is got touch sensors and it is got 3 white line sensors at the bottom with which it can sense whether it is on a white line or not to help it navigate and all the all this signal conditioning is done on the lower board and the upper board here is a daughter board on which you can use various processors like if you are teaching an 8051 based course you can put an 8051 daughter board and you can write 8051 code or you can have an Atmega 2560 daughter board or you can have an arms 7 based daughter board or we are creating new boards with FPGAs on it and things like that ok. So this project tries to address the weakness of our education system especially in computer science where there is a lack of experimental skills right. So we will come to that we have used these robots very successfully in courses like microcontrollers, embedded systems in computer science it is been used to teach a mechatronics course in aero, control systems course, sensors and actuators, instrumentation, measurement and calibration and so on ok. This slide just shows you the situation that we found on the ground about 5 to 6 years ago where the cheapest robots were about 30 to 40 thousand rupees on the net and even if we bought them they would not come with support and things like that. So that is when our initial versions were about 12000 rupees and 15000 rupees and since then we have developed these robots to be reasonably rugged right as we will discuss. So this is a slide that just shows you the various kind of kluji robots that we built along the way in arriving at our nice robot. And the ecosystem that we have which you folks can use is we have 3 different flavors of robots at the moment with different processors. We have documentation for each of these we have an extensive hardware manual and a software manual and things like that. We have teaching material which is lecture slides, course notes, assignments, quizzes, how to set up and administer this lab, lots of project videos and more importantly the code right. So you can take somebody else's story and build on it ok. I will give you a small demo of the sorts of projects that the students have done. There is support for this on a website called eientra.org and there is a company which manufactures these robots and there will be more now and it supports it with spare parts and all this also. Lots of participants till date like for instance national institutes of technology and other colleges ok. This is the first workshop that we had in December 2009 where there was one professor Nagla there who took all these things and very enthusiastically deployed it at NIT Jalandhar and we were very happy to see a few months later that he sends us back an update saying that our students have been have learned the basic skills of this embedded program and mobile robot in a workshop that we came back and conducted under eientra at our college. And after that these guys the students actually bought components locally and built a very interesting robot and then got written about in the local newspapers because this little robot of theirs goes and cleans up a barber shop right. So it is the same robot but with the little vacuum cleaner it goes and picks up all the hair in a barber shop right. So this is what they were able to do through a participation in the eientra program if you like. This is what our undergraduate lab looks like at IIT Bombay where we have everything on a laptop and we have a robot which they program through the laptop and they do some very interesting projects right. I will give you I will show you a video actually of this ok. So what I will do now is that let me show you a few videos. We have a problem with rooting the laptop video directly into the video feed but what we have done is that each of the faculty who come here we have recorded them giving their feedback. So you can share with your colleagues what you believe this workshop was like. So I am sure you cannot hear this too well. So what I will do is that I will show you some interesting visuals actually ok. This is more interesting. This is some of the lab projects which my last class had done. So this is the project where the students have taken a version of the robot which has got six legs. So this processor can drive something like 18 servo motors. So we have a robot called a hexapod which can write on paper. So here is another variant. These students have made this robot climb stairs and then once it reaches the stairs right it does something interesting ok. This is something interesting that the students did they thought let us make it dance ok. Here is another project where the students have captured an image a sketch then they have written some image processing software to skeletonize the drawing and from that they vectorize the drawing and then they have made that they have made the robot draw that sketch on a sheet of paper right. So this is how for instance it was drawing the sketch. What they did is that they mounted pen on a servo motor right and this robot can also wirelessly talk to the PC. So wirelessly they are giving it commands to move and raise and lower the pen for instance ok. Then there is another lot who wanted to use a sensor inside a mobile phone to drive a robot. So I bought them a we bought them an android phone a Motorola android phone and they use the tilt sensor inside the mobile phone to control the robot through Bluetooth right. So they also had to first of all wrote software to run inside the phone and they also had to create a small board a Bluetooth interface board which would receive signals on the robot. Another lot built a hand gesture control wireless vehicle where they built a little board with sensors inside it and by turning the hand right you can guide the robot around a course. Another bunch of guys built a tennis ball collector robot which has a little video camera mounted in the front and the image processing is happening on the PC. So it is it is seeing an orange ball then it goes close to it and picks it up with arms that these guys have made. So the robot looks for a blue basket and goes and dumps the ball inside there. These guys have tried to try to emulate an automatic toll tax collection system with two robots. So first the robot stops at a black patch and then it starts and then when it reaches the camera which is here right on the third black patch it stops and we have written the registration number on a white sheet on the side of the robot. So the image processing is done to capture the image of the registration number they process it and then they debit that value from the database and the vehicle owner also gets an SMS on their mobile phone the fact that their account has been debited right. Here is the last one that I will show here because of shortage of time farmer assistant robot. So these guys want to sort of to emulate a fruit picking exercise where they see ripe fruits which are red and on the first pass this will go and identify where the fruits are and on the next pass it will actually go and pick up the fruits right. So these guys have taken the basic robot and they just made the mechanisms with which to just actuate and to grip the the the objects and stuff like that. So the robot is reasonably versatile. So what we have shared with you here is just about four or five of 20 20 very interesting projects that students have done over a course of about five to six weeks right. So we have an embedded systems course called CS 684 which runs for the mtech students and over a semester they first go through the theory and in the last five weeks or six weeks of the course they actually speck out a project and they build a project and what you saw were examples of what they did in about four to five weeks. Now you too can do these kind of projects very simply by plugging into the e-anthro program right all you have to do is a couple of faculty have to come to IIT Bombay get trained we show you how to use the robots you go back with a couple of robots and see how you can use it on your B engineering projects if there are some lab staff that need to be trained we can accommodate them also in a next workshop and these workshops are running throughout the year. So once you have this gyan there are various ways that we can engage you more deeply into this entire exercise. So this e-anthro website e-anthro.org it is actually right is an open source website where we have courseware how to set up the entire embedded systems lab and it has got various assignments and all that on it you can go and register on this website if you want to attend a workshop or you want to host a workshop but there are specific ways that we have. So I will talk more about now the partner program model that we have here okay how can colleges take part in this program right. So we have step one you come and participate. Participate means that two of your faculty have to come and attend an IIT Bombay workshop for two days you just have to get here and get back we will look after you here for two days and after that you will be able to take these these two robots which we give you and start seeing what you can do with it in your college. If you want to participate more deeply right then you can become an associate where you can arrange the workshop at your college and our team will come and train the people at that workshop right and we will also fund that exercise. So it will be at our cost and the third is that we have an e-anthro hub or a remote center that means if faculty are enthusiastic enough then we will treat you as a center which we will help you build we will help you build the work the lab and all that and you can host the workshops there and eventually we bring you up to becoming a partner where we can actually fund interesting R and D that you do there if your students want to build an interesting robot they will need components they will need devices they will need to buy things of the market 30,000 rupees 40,000, 50,000 rupees or whatever it is we can give you money to buy those kind of things if faculty is enthusiastic enough to want to develop courseware based on these robots we can pay an honorarium also as far as that goes and better still for this we will have to introduce you as partners to MHRD right to be able to fund you at a deeper level it can be a few lakhs or whatever it is depending on the need and you can come up with your own robotic proposals which you can submit then to MHRD if you like and we will help you do that so details of this right step one is participation send to faculty to us they get exposure they take back to robots with them we give you a certificate that you have taken part in this intelligent robotics workshop there are no fees involved we provide you accommodation and boarding and lodging you can send back key students who you feel will help the program on the next workshop and now the college has to fill up a questionnaire right giving us information about yourselves and indicating a commitment to deploy these robots in an appropriate way then an associate is where you host the workshop and our team comes and delivers the workshop and we are hoping that after this you will become a hub that means that you will conduct these workshops so we will equip you with the robots and all that that you need to conduct the workshops right and in the process the host faculty will get trained and the workshop cost will be borne by us by the ENTRA project right the third grade of engagement is where you are conducting your workshop on your own at your location by yourselves without the IIT Bombay team you target audience from surrounding colleges but the costs will be borne by us right we will pay for it and certification will be by us that means that we say this is the ENTRA project and certificate and the faculty has attended a workshop okay and the robots that you need to conduct these workshops will be provided by us right final is where you turn into a partner where we will then have to take you with us to MHRD you will sign an MOU and we can we are then in the position to give you more money for things like R and D and an honorarium for developing courseware and stuff like that and you can be given grants to buy research robots depending on the kind of enthusiasm and the resources and the faculty that you have and this can lead to more interesting things where you can directly then interact with MHRD right to write proposals and things like that okay so the social impact we feel of this will be to spread the study and the use of robotics in colleges we think it is extremely important create a kind of multidisciplinary manpower right which is not just good at this or that but they can think in terms of solving a problem like for instance once you have learned to play with these robots and you understand how these robots are built there is nothing stopping you from building say a machine which can go and work in a field which can do seeding for instance right or then there is nothing stopping you from building say a small military application right I was just discussing with a colleague from the army this morning that many of the problems that we have to solve when we build interesting applications on the robot can apply to military applications they can apply to civilian applications they can apply to agricultural applications or what have you like for instance based on this experience we have actually built and delivered an autonomous vehicle for a campus which essentially what we have done is that we have built a control system into an autonomous vehicle which is like an electric golf cart and it can autonomously navigate around campus so what we have done is that whereas our robots they follow a white line based on sensors these have this this vehicle has got the magnetometers built into the bumper and we embed small magnets one foot apart on the road slightly below the ground and this vehicle it follows this and takes a number of it takes up to about five people passengers so it starts it starts motivating you to study much more many other interesting areas okay so the game is to excite and motivate the study of engineering right and provide opportunities for entrepreneurship that means you might your students might see openings for building various devices and automation equipment for local industry or for other uses and they can actually build with this knowledge these kind of devices and so we are providing manpower for healthcare automobiles large number of industries right to show that engineering is not only about you know just solving this kind of problem or that kind of problem or writing software for this system it can be really fun right and we find that these robots they really excite the students right so especially when you are doing say a B engineering project half the problem is in exciting your students once they are excited they can do amazing things on their own okay so this was the first lot of robots that we deployed we had about 100 of them and this is what they look like it looked very nice and these have gone out to all the various engineering colleges which came and attended our workshops and the if you want to know more about our project these are the important emails the project email is eantra at cac.itb.ac.in buvna looks after our admin so if you have some initial inquiries you mail to buvna at cse program manager is malty so malty at it.itb.ac.in and malty will take a call with us on things like getting people for workshops for ranging workshops at your college and things like that so I have written some important phone numbers also down and there is a website page for registration which is given at the bottom the eantra.org slash ci slash workshop slash participate okay so this is what I wanted to say and I think I am well within time we are in a position here to take some interaction or questions. Meanwhile I can also show some interesting videos this is the vehicle that moves around this is the vehicle that moves around following the magnets in the ground some of the older project this is with these robots this adaptive cruise control where a number of robots are following each other maintaining a safe distance right using the infrared proximity sensors right and this is an interesting project done by systems and control student where he built an inverted pendulum right where there is a potentiometer the base of this of this dandy if you like through which he controls a robot to balance a stick. So this is the principle behind things like the segue machine which is the people transporter which is two wheels right so here is this again as you can see we like to video everything because typically what happens after the project is done everything is disbanded and you cannot reconstruct the old device again so we like to video everything and documented well and everything is up also on the eantra.org website here is another interesting project instead of two motors we actuate six legs right so we get this kind of walking action with an insect so this is the same robot but the actuation is not by two DC motors the actuation is through servo motors which are moving legs here is another one this is we were exploring lane merging where two vehicles are merging lanes on to an in an automated way so we are thinking about intelligent highways and we found that we were able to get a couple of papers in very respected real-time systems journals based on this work because the problems were quite interesting so my colleague professor Krithi Ramamritham had done this work with a couple of m tech students right so these these vehicles are doing adaptive cruise control and also automatically well merging on to a highway okay show you some more okay here is another one where this is a soccer playing robot this is about four years ago and we have a camera on top a webcam which is looking at an image of the top of this robot based on which it can sense the orientation and position of this robot and is using that to move the orange ball into the goal right as you can see all these are four to six week projects basically that students have done on the embedded systems course this is another project where we have the same same robot but actuation now is through three wheels and each of the wheels has got a bunch of small wheels which run in a perpendicular axis and by differentially driving these wheels you can get a left right and front back motion also okay fine so to put everything in a nutshell we have got some interesting experience we would like to share with you we find that robots are a great way to motivate students to do some interesting projects and it motivates them to learn anything that you want you can have database also on robots where we find for instance what is a database actually it is storing a large amount of data and processing it interestingly so when you find that robots are negotiating say a large space with lots of obstacles and things like that they need to store store interesting information in interesting ways so that they can use it to determine what to do next right so there are lots of interesting applications which can be built on this and the interesting thing is that these robots we consider them as as a pen and it is up to your students and yourselves to develop interesting applications and write interesting stories with this pen and to share these stories with other people right so I have just shown you a small number of projects other students have done other interesting projects and the nice advantage is that now we are in the process of uploading the documentation the video the source code everything onto our website so your students can tomorrow take the same project and build on it right they can build on it that means that that is the starting point they do not have to build a robot they can just acquire the robot take the code and build a more complex application out of it and when we are at this stage then it the computer science aspects of the problems that need to be solved become much more interesting you get problems in networking then in communication in image processing in databases all sorts of things right but you can use the robots to motivate the teaching of whichever area that you have okay so I would like to pause here there are some questions I would like to give the the floor to waltz and the college of engineering hello sir sir one question is which programming tools are used with this hardware and second question is can can we interface these hardware with the programming tools directly over to you sir typically these are open source c compilers to be used with the precise microcontrollers that we use and we provide you with the compilers and depending on the processor which is available there are ways simple ways to just upload your code right onto the robot and and execute it these things become very mechanical right so one is that you write your your programs in c so when you come and attend the two-day workshop we teach you how to do that we teach you how to take the take control of the various resources on the on the microcontroller right like how to how to take the control of ports use ports to drive the motors and to sense the various sensors on the robot and so on and then we show you how to do pulse width modulation of the motors to increase and decrease speed and things like that show you how to use the interrupts and all that on the robot to to to do interesting things that you need to do like even control velocity and all that so what essentially happens is that typically we find with students computer science students they have typically heard of of interrupts and things like that they learned about it in theory but they have never used interrupts so it was quite heartening to see their excitement in actually having to write an ISR and execute it on the robot for instance so having said that one of the languages that you can use on the robot is c but we also have tools which can take astral programs for instance you can take an astral program and use our tool chain to convert it into c program which can go and run the robot so you can program the robot at a higher level of abstraction then you can write matlab code if you like to control the robot and now we are in the process of porting all this into sci lab so you can do visual programming these robots are also available inside the proprietary robot programming environments like microsoft robotic studio the cto of microsoft was kind enough to give us a project here to port our robot into a microsoft robotic studio so you can do a visual programming of the robot also in that you can do a simulation of the of the robot in that and so on before you actually deploy the code on the robot having said that I have a number of mtec students who are doing interesting projects on how to harness open source robot programming languages like player and stage to actually program these robots so there is some research work also going on and that can be a separate discussion but the main programming language that we use to program these robots is c and we use well off the shelf compilers to address the processors any other questions thank you sir okay okay that was useful so what we are trying to do is that we are trying to create a lot of software around these robots so the important thing is that if you want to get started it becomes very easy for you because all the documentation is there videos are there of the various projects and you can also buy the robots off the shelf right and you can buy it on the net also now and if you come to a workshop we will give you the initial two robots and if you show that you are interested in hosting these kind of workshops then we will help you to set up a lab with these robots and all that way you can host these workshops and also run student projects and things like that so we are very keen to find enthusiastic faculty very keen to find enthusiastic students who can help us spread this excitement that we have to other places in the country right and we are most happy to help if if anybody is interested we have a query from Jaipur Engineering College yes I want to organize the robotics workshop in in our college so how can I approach to you and what is the whole processor to organize this workshop in our college and also we want to include all these nearby colleges in Jaipur and in others in other cities so what is the processor to collect these all colleges faculties and different participants in our college good question which I am sure is on the mind of of of other colleagues also start with registering yourself on the ianthra.org website that you are interested in in either attending it will start with two faculty from your college coming and attending a workshop at IIT Bombay and then we will get you started with everything else right that is the initial well initiation if you like right two people from your college come here and then we will we will train them up and we will send them back with two robots and the whole story will start from there you can also contact through email our program manager Malti Bharu I have put her address up on the last slide and she will get you started and there are a couple of phone numbers also that you can call there is a mobile number so there lots of ways just right to us and we will get you started. So, we have scheduled some workshops starting from January and once we hear from the various participants of this program we can start scheduling workshops accordingly. There is a question from from Amritha Engineering College in Column who want to develop some home cleaning robots how a good way to start is you can take the firebird robots that we have developed here and again send people down to us we will train them send you back and then you can develop a home cleaning robot the interesting thing is the algorithms that you will use right. So, there is no one best algorithm there are a number of home cleaning robots out there in the market and they and they deploy a variety of algorithms right one I have seen which which goes zigzag and covers a space the other I have seen like the Roomba it goes in a spiral kind of direction and covers a space. The interesting problems that need to be solved in in in room cleaning robot is a number of things how do you how do you localize yourself right do you want some localization algorithm like do you want to be able to know where in the room you are do you want to be able to map the room and then clean it or do you want to just blindly just go on spiraling and clean the room whichever it is. So, these these things throw up a number of interesting questions because each of these techniques of room cleaning impact the nature of the robot the nature of the algorithm and the cost of the robot right like if you want to have very sophisticated positioning and mapping of a room right then you need something like a GPS kind of thing, but you cannot use GPS inside a house a GPS global positioning system only works outdoors. So, how do you position yourself in an in an enclosed space then it is up to you to choose various ways one is that the way we do it is that we mount a little webcam at a height it looks down on the floor and you can do image processing to identify where you are right or somebody else did the flip thing they use the webcam on the robot itself and it would look at the ceiling and by looking at the ceiling it would try and localize itself. So, it is like you are lying down on the robot and you look at the fan and based on the fan you know where the center of the room is because the fan typically is in the center of the room and then you localize yourself you find the walls and all that. In fact, I have not shown you some other projects which have happened where a robot goes inside a space with obstacles and it tries to map out the room. So, you have this notion of slam simultaneous localization and mapping where through its sensors it tries to figure out where it is moving around and it tries to reconstruct the boundaries of the room. So, again there are some very interesting algorithms that come out of this lots of algorithm issues and stuff like this. Then there another student had done depth mapping where you take two cameras like two eyes and by seeing the differential images from the two cameras their algorithms with which to sense the depth of objects in front of you. So, all this code is available to your students if they want to pick up where these students have left off. So, there lots of other interesting issues that come if you use a very sexy algorithm which is very high bandwidth processing and things like that you will need a very big processor on the robot. So, that increases the cost. So, typically what happens is that most of the image processing that we do here is done by having a video a wireless video camera on the robot these things are not very expensive and it beams an RF signal to the PC where it has a receiver. So, you are getting real time video from the robot, but all the processing is done on the PC and the robot is just told how to move through the wireless communication right. So, typically most of the image processing algorithms that we have on the robot presume a PC on which the real time video feed is being received, processed and the robot is being told what to do. But we are also working on a generation of a robot which has the processing capability also built into it right and we are hoping that once colleges jump on to the bandwagon you might have some specific skills where you can build some interesting algorithms which others can use. And we were really heartened to see in the faculty who visited us people who would make very good partners they got we have specialists in instrumentation in control systems in electronic design power electronics. So, I am hoping that the more and more people come into the program the more and more interesting code you will get to build on right presuming these robots. So, maybe I should stop here I have run out of time there is one more question. So, this is IPS Indore yeah let us have your question. Okay the question from what I can hear is how can we contribute to the robot design is there some basic mechanical engineering and so on. See the robot is kind of has already been designed for you initially. So, the basic robot is available you can just buy it and deploy it and once you start working with it then you can start extending the robot now there are various ways to extend it. As you can see from the few videos that I showed the students have taken servo motors and just integrated them into the robot. So, typically what they will use is that there was one pod that we have it is a kind of servo mounted pod which is typically used to mount a camera and you can zoom pan tilt the camera and you can control it through one of the ports the expansion ports which are there on the robot right. All these things are documented in the hardware and software manuals and it is reasonably straightforward. And so using this servo motor these guys built a device with which to do pen down and pen up when doing the drawing application. Similarly, others used another motor to control a gripper arm to open and close the gripper arm others have used have made out of mechanical kind of components a gantry with which a gripper arm can be raised up and lowered down. All these things are very simply interfaced with the microcontroller that we have. Once you got used to these robots and you study the design of these robots you can build your own robots and you can contribute your designs on to the iantra website. So, there is there is nothing stopping you from making your own designs and putting it up on the website. But we would like to have detailed diagrams we would like to have detailed information as to how to reconstruct what you have built. So, there is nothing stopping you this is all open source it is to be shared with everybody it is to help others also do what you have done and take it from there. So, I think what you are also asking if I might say is how do we basically build these robots? Most the workshops that we give here at the moment are on how to use these robots and program these robots and take control of the microcontroller. But the question you will well ask is how do you build these robots? So, we will address that in other workshops that we plan to have. At the moment we are adding an image processing module into our workshops because we have noticed that most of the interesting projects that the students have done have an image processing component to it. So, we are adding an image processing module to this and like for instance typically we can cover this in about 2 hours. So, we are just adding this into our existing workshop. So, it is amazing what we can do in 2 days with you right you can go with a lot of knowledge right. And then there are so many other things to do like we want to know more about AI artificial intelligence and how we can use AI to control robots. So, this is only a start watch this space we will come up with more content that we will deploy on the workshops. And we are hoping that you faculty out there once you get into the program you want to develop special skills. Hopefully you will share them with us and help us build specialized modules like say control systems modules or maybe even an AI module right with which we can illustrate AI algorithms on these robots. So, this is only a start and I shall stop here unless there are any more questions. So, I think we will we call it a day here and if you have any inquiries please address them to the email addresses at the end of the presentation we are happy to get you started. And this program is going to be greatly expanding this year. So, the best time to talk to us is now. And once we have responses from at least this lot of engineering colleges we will be in a position to schedule workshops to which we can invite you starting from January. So, I strongly urge you to go to our website register yourselves whoever is interested and write to us and we will get you plugged into the system. So, I shall stop here. Thank you.