HYDERABAD: Students of International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT)-Hyderabad have developed a robot which seems to be straight out of a Hollywood movie.
The robot has the capability to detach itself into various parts which can spread over an area, even into crammed spaces to conduct surveillance after which it can re-attach itself and even climb stairs or move over various kinds of terrain. The robot, known as Detachable Complaint Modular Robot (DCMR), can prove of help for a variety of security or rescue missions.
DCMR has been developed by students of Robotics Research Center (RRC) at IIIT-Hyderabad under the guidance of Prof K Madhava Krishna. The robot’s prototype and the research paper on it will be presented by the students at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Singapore from May 29 to June 3 this year. ICRA is a premier international forum for robotics researchers to present their work for which researchers from across the world apply.
Two other research papers on prototypes of robots developed by students from RRC will be presented at the conference. As companies focus on developing vehicles which can drive themselves around without any driver, there is a big challenge of lowering costs as it involves usage of expensive technology Light Detection and Ranging(LiDAR) and stereo camera rigs. However, IITH have developed the technology which can recover 3D shapes and pose of a vehicle based just on the 2D colour image taken from a regular camera.
Project on visual servoing
Another project at ICRA is a research on visual servoing (VS) or vision-based robot control using convolutional neural networks (CNN). VS is the method used in robots which move based on their vision.