NEW DELHI: The Government will launch a mission on cyber physical systems (CPS) that will help prepare for a new category of jobs, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said in his Budget address and allotted an initial ₹100 crore to commence the project.
“Combining cyber and physical systems have great potential to transform not only innovation ecosystem but also our economies and the way we live. To invest in research, training and skilling in robotics, artificial intelligence, digital manufacturing, big data analysis, quantum communication and internet of things, Department of Science & Technology will launch a mission on cyber physical systems to support establishment of centres of excellence. I have doubled the allocation on Digital India programme to ₹3,073 crore in 2018-19,” he added.
The Hindu reported last April that such a scheme was on the anvil and there were plans to set up research centres at some of the Indian Institutes of Technology to execute this.
CPS is an interdisciplinary field that deals with the deployment of computer-based systems that do things in the physical world, such as, for instance, the self-driven cars produced by Google and Tesla.
However, even smart grids (where electricity is optimally distributed on the basis of calculations in real time by micro-processors) as well as autonomous unmanned vehicles and aircraft navigation systems qualify as ‘cyber physical systems.’
Prime Minister Narendra Modi had referred to cyber physical systems last January at the Indian Science Congress in Tirupati. Though India is only now developing a programme on CPS, the National Science Foundation of the United States had identified it as a key area of inter-disciplinary research back in 2003.
