Indian students ensure robot's walk to global contest

New Delhi: Bespectacled and with numerous files under their arms, 21-year-old Samay Kohli and 19-year-old Arpit Mohan look like any other student. But these two students of premier engineering institute BITS Pilani, Rajasthan, have for the first time in India developed a humanoid robot that they will, despite funding problems, take to the world's biggest robot competition.

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"Although Indians staying abroad, that is, non-resident Indians (NRI), have developed humanoids before, we are the first Indians here to have developed one," Kohli beamed.

"To be more specific we have developed a biped in which we have perfected the gait movement of the robot so that it resembles a human being very closely," he told IANS here.

A team of four students, including Harsh Sinha and Prayag Mukherjee, besides Kohli and Mohan, has developed a 50-cm tall prototype of the humanoid robot, a robot which they are taking to the RoboGames, the biggest robot competition in the world at San Francisco.

"RoboGames, as is featured in the Guinness book of world records, is the biggest open robot competition in the world and we will be the first Indian team to participate in the humanoid section of the competition," Mohan said.

The biped, which Kohli and his team has created, can self-balance itself, can climb stairs 20 percent of its height, has a high walking speed and very flexible legs which can move on seven different axis.

Winning the competition was, however, not the aim when the students got down to making the model six months ago.

"Winning the competition was never our intention. What we are more interested in is the research part of it. The competition is in June this year and we hope to complete the final model by May.

"If we win, there are several non-Indian companies that have shown interest in funding our research. We will then apply for a patent," Kohli said.

Funding at this stage, which is crucial for the team to go and participate in the competition in the first place, is turning out to be a major challenge.

"The BITS alumni association has sponsored 500,000 and all others who we have approached have agreed to sponsor our travel. But we need 300,000 to 400,000 more for the model itself because most of its components, like the motor, are unavailable here and have to be brought in from the US.

"We are yet to receive any kind of help from the government unlike in the US where the government pushes research for technology. We did approach the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) but they are interested more in technology that will help defence," Kohli said.

But the team is still hopeful.

"In the next few months we will take the biped to the various festivals at engineering institutes, including the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), and ask experts there for any advice to improvise our model.

"If nothing works out on the funding front, we will look at the option of self-funding. We have spent a lot of time in this project unlike other competitors who just spend a month or two and we really want to carry on with this research," the duo said enthusiastically. (Azera Rahman can be contacted at azera.p@ians.in)
Source: IANS