HUBBALLI: The Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Dharwad is adding speech-recognition features to humanoid robots at its campus in Hubballi to help the elderly and patients.
The prestigious IIIT has tied up with the Technology Incubation Hub on Autonomous Navigation and Data Acquisition (TiHAN), Invento Robotics and other firms to take up the Autonomous Navigating Humanoid project, aiming to add more features to Mitra robots.
Dr KT Deepak, a professor at IIIT and project investigators, said Invento Robotics has developed Mitra robots, which have a speech-recognition program developed by US-based firms. But the aim of the Autonomous Navigating Humanoid project is to develop own speech-recognition program. “At first, we will focus on Hindi and will add other regional languages later,” he added.
After the speech program is completed, sensors, speech recognition programs, computer vision modules, identifying living and non-living beings and other features will be added to the robots that will be procured from Invento Robotics. The robots will help the elderly people and patients by taking them to different places in their house, reminding them about taking medicines and talking to them.
“Private companies, like Google, Amazon, IBM and others, have already developed speech-recognition programs. But buying their software and installing it in robots costs a lot. Our program will be cost-effective and can be widely used across the country,” said another professor.