Robotics Teaching Lab

Description

Robotics has been at the center of attention of students, faculty, industry, as well as the general public for a long time. Over the past few years, robotics has shown tremendous growth and a wide variety of robotic applications have been developed. There is a lot of enthusiasm and interest among the students towards robotics and there have been many formal and informal robotics related programs on campus. However, there are no formal academic programs at IIT Madras that is fully devoted to robotics and this has been a matter of concern to many faculty involved in teaching and research in robotics. Robotics being an interdisciplinary subject, there are many departments and faculty teaching robotics and doing research in the areas related to robotics. While no departments have the necessary critical mass to offer a dedicated program in Robotics, the combined strength of various departments makes it a highly feasible option. With this focus, IIT Madras has introduced the Interdisciplinary Dual Degree Program in Robotics from 2018 onwards

The objective of the dual degree program will be to nurture and develop the next‐generation professionals in the area of robotics who can contribute in the design, development, and implementation of robotic systems in the industry and help the industry to improve their productivity, leading to the overall economic growth of the country.
The dual degree program in Robotics will be having its focus on Design, Analysis, and Application development (new system development). The curriculum has been developed with this focus and students in all the disciplines can opt for this dual degree at the end of 5th Semester.  
Hands‐on experience is a vital component in learning robotics. Keeping this in mind, a laboratory course has been proposed in the curriculum. The laboratory experiments will give practical exposure on various types of robots and their design, programming, and control. The laboratory will be set up in the Dept. of Engineering Design and an area of approx. 1800Sq.ft. has been earmarked for this purpose.

The curriculum for Inter-Disciplinary Dual Degree Program in Robotics specifies a laboratory course of 6 credits in the 9th semester. The laboratory experiments will give the necessary hands-on-experience as well the practical exposure on various types of robots and their design, programming, and control.
 

1. Sensors and Actuators: Integration of various types of sensors, programming, data analysis
2. Serial Manipulators:Forward and Inverse Kinematics, Path Planning, Trajectory tracking, Singularity analysis
3. Parallel Manipulators: Forward/Inverse kinematics, singularity analysis, Path planning
4. Wheeled Mobile Robots:  Design, control, motion planning
5. Robotic vision system: Programming, image processing, obstacle detection
6. Underwater robots: Design, modelling and simulation
7. Aerial Robots: design, control, programming (fixed wing/flapping wing/VTOL)
8. Robot calibration: Calibration of industrial robots
9. Surgical robots: Haptic system, RCM design
10.Team Projects ( 3 sessions)
 

Laboratory space of approximately 1800 Sq. feet is needed for setting up the facility.