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Students in our country can now get to work with robots

K. Ramachandran

A major initiative by European Union is set to make study in systems engineering possible at an affordable cost for Indian institutions

BUILDING CONNECTIONS: S. Gowri (far right) Head, Department of Manufacturing Engineering, Anna University, with (from left) Ramon Barber of University of Carlos III, Madrid, and Florian Zeiger and Rajesh Shankar of Julius Maximilians Universitat, Ger many. — Photo: K.V. Srinivasan

IMAGINE A student's delight when he or she is able to access the best of robotic equipment, experiment with them, use their utilities for doing various functions. All this during exclusively allotted time to use the robots and robotics systems. The joy would grow further if the student is able to change the parameters to make the robots perform particular manoeuvres, even complex ones.

Expensive

But then robots can be expensive. Not all institutions or even university laboratories today will be able to procure, maintain and update the hardware and software of the robot systems.

But, thanks to a major initiative by the European Union, Indian institutions can now aim at taking their levels of learning and experimentation to higher levels, besides furthering their research in robotic and systems engineering. Here's where a major initiative by the European Union is about to help Indian institutions achieve higher levels of learning and experimentation, besides research in robotic and systems engineering.

The International Virtual Laboratory in Mechatronics is a project that is getting nearly 500,00 Euros from the EU under the European Union - India Cross Cultural Programme (EICCP).

In Europe, the coordinating universities are the Julius Maximilian Universitat of Würzburg (Germany) and the University of Carlos III, Madrid (Spain). At present, their Indian links are with the Chennai-based Anna University and the Madurai-based Thiagarajar College of Engineering.

"The main objective of our project is to jointly develop an International `Virtual' Mechatronics laboratory, specialising in robotics and telematics, with facilities physically present in India and Europe but virtually available to students at each university. We can use this virtual laboratory for tele-education and research," says Rajesh Shankar of Julius Maximilian Universitat. He, along with Florian Zeiger, one of the coordinators of the International Virtual Lab in Mechatronics, was in Chennai, visiting leading institutions such as the IITs at Kanpur and in Mumbai, besides institutions in Chennai, Madurai and Coimbatore. His university has invested huge sums in the last 15 years, creating the systems and making them available online.

Nominal licence fee

By paying a nominal licence fee, the participating institution gets virtual access through the Internet to the hardware and software at the two European universities, and use them for experiments from remote locations.

Mr. Florian Zeiger says the project can significantly reduce the cost of telematics facility by developing an international "virtual" Telematics laboratory, specialised in tele-robotics, control engineering, and mechatronics, with facilities physically spread over Europe and Asia, but virtually available at each university via the Internet.

"All that a student of a participating institution needs is a computer with good Internet facility and of course, the necessary firewalls and security features to access our hardware. He or she gets dedicated hours to use the hardware and larger number of hours for tutorials, experimentation, and research," Mr. Zeiger adds. Evaluation is done based on a set of questions based on the experiments.

"We have eight experiments in areas such as Kinematics of mobile robots, pathplanning of a car-like mobile robot, motor control, remote controlled robot arm, events detection, topological navigation, tracing the boundary of the wall, and repeatability analysis of a mobile robot using computer vision," the German academic says.

The website dedicated for the project can be used to see the virtual lab, and a student can give the specific parameters to change or manipulate the robots in Europe and make them perform specific talks. The student can mathematically model or simulate a movement or task using the teaching modules and during the dedicated machine time, test the simulation with the real situation.

The monitoring person at the European end also gets to learn more through the virtual interaction, he adds.

Dr. Gowri, head of the Department of Manufacturing Engineering at Anna University, made a presentation to representatives of the colleges under the university on the virtual mechatronics lab and exhorted them to participate in the project to get the benefit of high-end robotics and systems engineering experiments. He demonstrated to the audience how robots can be controlled from anywhere on earth using the Internet. Anna University has a two-year tenure project for the virtual lab.

"President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam (who was teaching technology and social transformation at Anna University before taking up the highest post), has stated that tele-education helps to overcome the constraints of time and space and helps in developing a knowledge society. That's what we seek to achieve by participating in this project," says Dr. Gowri, who himself was at the JMUW as an exchange student about a decade ago.

Vice-Chancellor D. Viswanathan says that tele-experiments and web-based labs will be greatly advantageous as they save time and cost. He believes that the emergence of virtual classrooms will help in better sharing of knowledge on technology advances among universities.

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