History and Growth of the School 

Robotic technology is influencing every aspect of humankind. Right from home automation, corporate sector, industries, healthcare sector to public places. It has the great potential to transform traditional work practices into smart operations by raising efficiency, safety, and ease of operation as desirable by humankind today. Along with the development of robots, trained human resources are required to operate and control the robots. With this view, the Department of Mechanical Engineering started the course of M.Tech in Mechanical engineering, specializing in robotics in 2015.

Later with the advancements and multi-domain contents of the course and to justify its interdisciplinary nature in a real sense, the School of Robotics is established. This course started running under the umbrella of the School of Robotics from the 2020-2022 batch.School of Robotics has the involvement of faculties from different departments of DIAT such as Electronics, Computer Science, Mathematics, etc. It is based upon the subjects covered under the M.Tech program.The course is designed to provide insights into many domains of Robotics technology. Hence, experts from different departments of DIAT and outside experts in academic or scientists are offered the subjects. For the dissertation work of one year, as a part of the course curriculum, students may get an opportunity to work with various Robotics labs across India such as CAIR, Banglore, Research & Development Establishment Engineers, Dighi, ISRO, Banglore, VSSC Thiruvananthpuram, DEBEL, Banglore, ADE, Banglore, etc. They may get an internship on the relevant robotics research project. Students will receive a degree in their graduation branch with a Robotics specialization at the end of the course.

Vision: To develop an innovative solution based interdisciplinary research platform to achieve academic and research excellence for the next generation

Mission: To work on research problems and innovative projects that extend state of the art in robotics

M.Tech in Mechanical Engineering (Robotics)

On completion of M. Tech. Programme, the specific outcome of the programme is to

• Provide human resources equipped with advanced applied knowledge in Robotic systems and related technologies to fulfill the needs of DRDO, tri-services, and Defence PSU’s, thereby making the country self-reliant Robotics.
• Associate with multi-disciplinary teams working on significant projects demanding global competencies.
• Collaborate with DRDO labs, DPSUs, industries, and universities of repute in higher education, training, and research, Review the literature data – gap analysis
• Are expected to apply analytical skills and modeling methodologies to recognize, analyze, synthesize and implement operational solutions to engineering problems, product design and development, and manufacturing
• Articulate strategies, modeling, analysis, and testing of mechatronic products, systems, and controllers using appropriate technology and software tools.

Following departments of DIAT are involved in the functionality of the school of Robotics-

• Mechanical Engineering.
• Electronics Engineering.
• Computer science Engineering.
• Applied Physics Engineering.
• Applied Mathematics Engineering.

Faculty Members:

Sr. No.	Name of Faculty	Designation	Contact Information	Email ID	Profile Picture	View Profile
1	Dr. Dineshsingh G Thakur	Professor, HoD; Director, School of Robotics (Additional Charge)	02024304195	thakur@diat.ac.in		view
2	Ms. Prajakta Koratkar	Assistant Professor (On Contract)	02024304186	prajkta_koratkar@diat.ac.in		view
3	Dr. Soumya S	Assistant Professor
4	Dr. Pooja Agrawal	Assistant Professor		pooja_agrawal@diat.ac.in

Research Areas 

• Internet of drone things
• Robot path planning and control
• Robot navigation
• Image processing for navigation of aerial vehicles.
• Remotely operated vehicles

Laboratories  

Lab Facilities

• ABB IRB 1200,Six Axes Articulated Robot Manipulator.
• Firebird VI-Mobile Robot.
• Firebird V Hexapod
• Dexter ER-2 Robotics Arm
• Fire Bird V 2560, 2148, P89V51RD2, Spark V

Equipment’s of the laboratory

Department Projects

Completed:

•  Identification of Moving Target and Tracking by Laser Aiming Pointer Which Can be Installed on Autonomous Weapon System
•  SLAM based Autonomous Navigation of Differential Drive Mobile Robot using Laser scanner and ROS
• Motion planning of robotics manipulation with deep reinforcement learning

 Ongoing Projects:

• Solar powered UAV with increased endurance (time) by use of TEG and solar concentrator/collectors.
• Indoor Swarm Robot Helpers
• Dynamic Trot-Walking with Quadruped Robot: Simulation, optimization, and its control

Mentors Associated

• Dr. Alok Mukharjee, Head, Robotics, R& DE, Engg, Dighi.
• Bharadwaj Amrutur, Chairman, Robert Bosch Centre for Cyber Physical Systems, Division of Interdisciplinary Sciences, IISc, Banglore.
• Dr. S K Saha, Professor, IIT Delhi

Achievements

• Here is the list of M. Tech Robotics projects completed by students in recent years.
• Identification & locking of mobile target and tracking using laser aiming pointer to be used on autonomous weapon system.
• Humanoid gripper mechanism.
• SLAM based Autonomous Navigation of Differential Drive Mobile Robot using a Laser scanner and ROS.
• Distributed object detection in Aerial Image
• Musculoskeletal modelling and simulation of biped locomotion for assistive device
• Vision Based Landing and Self-Charging System for Autonomous Quadrotors
• Walking pattern generation for biped robot and its comparison
• Speech To Text Recognition Using Deep Learning
• Design, Construction and Analysis of a Series Elastic Actuator with Control
• Motion planning of robotics manipulator with deep reinforcement learning.
• Stability Control and Simulation of Biped Robot (Walking Operation)
• Information extraction using stastical model.
• Design of actuator for autonomous assistive augmented device
• Machine Translation of Chinese-English Using Deep Neural Networks.
• Deep Neural Network based Autonomous Navigation for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle.

Collaborations

• R & D(E), DRDO, Dighi.
• Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, (CAIR) Banglore.
• VSSC, Thiruvananthpuram.
• DEBEL,DRDO, Banglore.
• ADE,DRDO, Banglore.

In near future School of Robotics is planning to collaborate with –

• Robert Bosch Cyber Centre for Physical system, IISC Banglore.
• Intelligent Automation Laboratory, Cranfield University, UK.
• SSIGMA, Pvt Ltd. Pune
• Robot research centre, College of Engineering , Pune.

Other Information

• Conducted online webinar on “Human Robot Interaction and Social Robotics” by Mr. Raviteja Burugu, MSc. Cranfield University, United Kingdom with overwhelming feedback of participants.
• School of Robotics is getting recognized among top Research and Development Labs of DRDO as well as upcoming Industries.