For those who cannot wait for the era of robots, International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) is the place to be. International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad’s (IIIT-H) Robotics Research Centre (RCC) has been selected to present its work at ICRA in Marina Bay Sands, Singapore, later this month.
The conference’s theme is: Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Real-world Solutions. Participants will have to use robotics and automation technology to solve challenging real-world problems. Students from IIIT-H will be presenting three of their breakthroughs in robotics — modular stair-climbing robots that can dissemble and reassemble for effective surveillance, visual servoing using convolutional neural networks and reconstructing vehicles from a single (RGB) image for autonomous driving.
“A publication in ICRA is a quality statement for roboticists all around the world — it being one of the topmost robotics conferences in the world. The fact that we get to attend and witness the state-of-the-art research going on at leading labs around the world, as also present our own work on par with them, is a privilege like no other!” says Sri Harsha Turlapati, dual degree researcher, who has been a space and Sci-Fi geek all through childhood. “I love to build robots and innovate! I want to find a PhD and then become a technical evangelist someday,” he adds.
Research paper submissions go through a rigorous process of selection. The students were guided by Associate Professor K. Madhava Krishna. Harit Pandya, PhD (CSE) student, says, “My aim is to build smart machines that could simplify human day-to-day tasks. After finishing my PhD, I want to join an academia.” Talking about the future of robotics, Utsav Shah, MS student, says, “Robotics has the potential of changing our lives in every way imaginable. I mostly work with drones. I want to boost civil and defence applications of robotics, especially drones or large aerial vehicles in the future.”
List of projects
- Detachable modular robot capable of cooperative climbing and multi agent exploration by Sri Harsha Turlapati, Ankur Srivastava, K. Madhava Krishna and Suril V. Shah
- Exploring convolutional networks for end-to-end visual servoing by Aseem Saxena, Harit Pandya, Gourav Kumar and K. Madhava Krishna
- Reconstructing vehicles from a single image: Shape priors for road scene understanding by J. Krishna Murthy, G.V. Sai Krishna, Falak Chhaya and K. Madhava Krishna
