‘India can lead world in providing low-cost solutions’

Robotics professor Sethu Vijayakumar says the country is lagging behind in manufacturing and innovation, but catching up in programming

Showing the way: Sethu Vijayakumar at TechFest 2018 at IIT-Bombay.

Noted international robotics professor Sethu Vijayakumar has said that India can provide low-cost solutions in a science domain and has shown great improvement when it comes to robotics.

Professor Vijayakumar, who judged the robot wars competition at the TechFest organised by the Indian Institute of Technology (Bombay) recently, holds a Personal Chair in Robotics within the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh and is director of the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics.

Speaking to

The Hindu on the wide-ranging subject of robotics, Professor Vijayakumar said, “Robotics in India is very different from what we have in other countries. I still think that India is lagging behind in terms of manufacturing and innovation of mechanical aspects. But when it comes to programming and control side of it, we are catching up.”

Indians, according to him, look at the context of where robotics can be applied and this could be in terms of agriculture, health care, pollution control and monitoring disaster. “I think India can lead the world in providing low-cost solutions in different aspects of science where higher-end solutions already exist,” he said.

‘Boosting efficiency’

Addressing people’s concern about losing jobs with development in robotics, Professor Vijayakumar said, “People have a misconception about robots...that in the future, robots may replace manpower and people might lose their jobs. This is not true. Instead, robots would help us work more efficiently and enable us to do things that cannot be done physically at present.”

Professor Vijayakumar believes that robots can be of great help to human life in the future and that humans with the help of robotics would be able to use resources without harming the environment. He said, “Moreover, Indian scientists and innovators are showing an inclination towards innovative robots that could be used as a companion and for security purposes.”

He added, “I think India is not the right market where robots can be used as a companion. Though a companion robot is a potential idea, in a country like India, which has a very different demography from others, I don’t think there is a need for it. It can be used in western countries where there are fewer humans to be around with.”

Addressing the issue of human loss in wars and use of robots for military purposes, Professor Vijayakumar said, “With regard to using robots for military purposes, there is a soldier sitting behind who makes a cognitive decision for firing a missile or using a weapon. You can then easily trace back that decision to an individual or the government. But once you have autonomous operations, it becomes quite hard to trace back the decisions. And that is what we want to avoid. I, personally, am against the use of robots for military purposes.”

Professor Vijayakumar, however, made an exception to this line of thought. He said, “Unless it is for a humanitarian cause, for instance, to save the lives of soldiers who are injured as a consequence of a disaster.”

‘Get the basics right’

Instrumental in bringing the first NASA Valkyrie humanoid robot out of the U.S. to Europe, Professor Vijayakumar said that the youth nowadays try to get into robotics too soon. He said that if one does not know the basics of mathematics, physics and differential equations, there is no way they can get into robotics. He said, “With the increasing trend to get into robotics in India, I fear that it is going more and more towards high-level cognitive innovations without even thinking about the control system. Then something could go wrong and that seems to be dangerous.”