Save for the bit about the missing cat, Professor Dilip Kumar Pratihar could pass for Professor Shonku, the iconic scientist created by Satyajit Ray. His laboratory at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, or IIT-Kgp, is a huge space full of machine parts, framed documents, white boards and stark floors for the experimental robots to move around freely. At any given time, the laboratory — also known as the Centre for Excellence in Robotics — has clusters of students testing something or the other. Unlike Shonku, however, Pratihar has a bunch of robots. Most of them have one thing in common — they are built to lend a helping hand to manual labourers working in difficult conditions.
Pratihar has a doctoral degree from IIT-Kanpur, with advanced training from Germany and Japan. Having grown up in a family of farmers in West Bengal’s West Midnapore district, he first invented a farm robot. This machine is meant to detect pests and spray pesticides. He says, “As a child, I often found that the farmhands my grandfather employed would be exhausted from carrying 20-litre tanks of pesticides on their backs. They would spray the pesticides and in the process be exposed to the harmful chemicals.” He continues, “As I grew older, I realised that farmers often fail to identify the pests hidden in the leaves and stems.”
Fast forward to the present. The AI-powered robot devised by Pratihar and his team can detect crop diseases and spray pesticides in a controlled way.
Says Pratihar, “Since agricultural fields have uneven surfaces, we have designed a tracked vehicle to ensure a wide workspace for the farm robot.” Tracked vehicles move on continuous bands of metal or rubber, called tracks, instead of wheels. This allows the vehicles to move easily over the soft or rough terrain of a farm.
His team has mounted a “serial manipulator” — a device resembling a human hand on top of a mobile contraption. The tracked mobile manipulator can collect information off plant leaves using a camera and find out whether the crops are suffering from any disease through digital image analysis and clustering. If any disease is detected, the robot judges the severity and determines the amount of pesticide required. As a result, wastage is less, costs are under control and the soil is protected from needless chemical pollution.
This robot has been tested on the ground. Soon it will be tested on the agricultural field of IIT-Kgp. Pratihar and co-researchers Pradeep Nahak, Atanu Jana and others were granted an Indian patent for the robot. They are now looking for an industry partner.
“Our robots are not going to push workers out of jobs,” says Pratihar, clarifying the obvious question on people’s minds. He adds, “They can be trained and integrated into the workplace as a safer alternative to human workers in dangerous environments.”
It is this idea that colours most of Pratihar’s inventions. For instance, he has seen how workers have a hard time in the maintenance of railway tracks. To carry out track inspections, railway gang men have to walk miles with a huge hammer in hand. Whenever they think they have spotted a fault, a labourer has
to strike it with the hammer to check. After an inspector has confirmed it, they have to mend it or change the line altogether to prevent any derailment or accident.
To protect human operators from conducting these difficult tasks, Pratihar’s team designed a railway track-inspection robot. He tells The Telegraph, “This robot fitted with a camera collects pictures of railway tracks to be inspected and sends them to a computer system for identifying cracks. If any defect is identified, the robot stops there. Its location is identified through a GPS mounted on it and transmitted to the inspector.”
Another time, Pratihar noticed how human inspectors in the chemical industry work in hazardous environments wherein temperatures are high and oxygen is low. So, he devised a pipe-crawling robot by mimicking the movement of a leech.
He explains, “While navigating these pipes, the robot inspects them, cleans them, paints them, and fixes the cracks or corrosion.”
These robots use advanced locomotion, sensors and high-resolution cameras to provide live video feeds.
He is also working on hexapods or spider-like six-legged robots that can handle toxic or radioactive material, inspect high-voltage power lines or blast furnaces, fire fight, work for bomb disposal squads, track landmines and search for survivors after earthquakes or fires.
Shonku’s robot was called Bidhushekhar. Pratihar’s creations are still lacking names. Suggestions, anyone?
