NA-SARATHY

About

Team NA-SARATHY is powered by Humanitarian Technology Labs (HuT Labs), Amrita Vishwa Vidhyapeetham, India. The team consists of talented and passionate individuals, who have several years of experience in different fields of Robotics and automation. The team is led by Dr. Rajesh Kannan Megalingam, director of Humanitarian Technology Labs. He has seven and a half years of work experience and ten years of research experience. He has published more than 160 research papers at various international conferences, journals and book chapters. He has won several awards including the 2020 IEEE Undergraduate Teaching Award, Best Outstanding Branch Counselor and Advisor Award from IEEE, NJ, USA, Outstanding Branch Counselor Award from IEEE Kerala Section, and Award of Excellence from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham. The NA-SARATHY team consists of 3 senior staff, 2 full-time researchers, 2 Ph.D scholars and 24 bachelor students, who participated in reputed international competitions like International Design Contest (IDC) Robocon 2018-19, Robo cup German open 2018-19, and World Robot Summit, Japan, 2018.

Achievements

Best Demo Award Best Mechanical Design RoboCon19 RoboCon18 International Competition

Best Demo Award

For the project ‘Intelligent Home Navigation System (IHNS) for the elderly and the physically challenged’, at the International Conference on Wireless Technologies for Humanitarian Relief (ACWR2011), Kerala, India.

Best Mechanical Design

Humanitarian Robot Competition – International Category, RAHA 2016.

RoboCon19

The team of students consisting of Ruthvik Chanda (Winner), Raviteja Geesala (Semi-Finalist), Deepak Nagalla. and Phanindra kumar Allada from the Humanitarian Technology (HuT) Labs participated in International Design Contest (IDC) Robocon2019 held at Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Boston,USA.

RoboCon18

The team of students consisting of Abhijeeth Prem (Winner), Sriniketh K (Winner), Bhanu Teja P. and Sarveswara Reddy from the Humanitarian Technology (HuT) Labs won First Prize and Sponsors’ Best Prize at RoboCon 2018 held at Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan.

International Competition

Vijayanta is the only team from India to take part in RoboCup German Open 2019 – Disaster Robot Category (Rescue Robot), Germany.

Paricharya is the only team from India to take part in RoboCup German Open 2019 – Home Service Robot Category, Germany.

Team Scorpion is the only team from India, qualified for the funding to take part in World Robot Summit 2018 – Standard Disaster Challenge, Tokyo, Japan.

Team Scorpion participated in RoboCup German Open 2018 – Disaster Robot Category (Rescue Robot), Germany.

Projects

CHETAK

CHETAK – A Self-governing and Multi-tasking Home Assistance Robot

CHETAK is a self-governing and multi-tasking home assistance robot to support the old, crippled and impaired individuals to do their daily life activities or regular tasks at home and hospital environments.

CHETAK has a highly integrated architecture with features like Object Vision, Speech Recognition, Autonomous Navigation with Obstacle Avoidance and a 6 Degree of Freedom Robotic Arm to make the robot serviceable.

The robot can perceive the trained objects or persons and can differentiate among objects dependent on class and can foresee the qualities like Gender, Age and Posture. It can listen to commands from a person and perform the tasks accordingly in an autonomous way.

Paripreksya

Paripreksya – A Rescue Robot

Paripreksya is a teleoperated UGV (Unmanned Ground Vehicle) developed at HuT Labs. It is a lightweight robot capable of doing complex manoeuvring, mobility and dexterity tasks. The robot typically consists of a mobile base and a manipulator. The mobile base is responsible for the manoeuvring and mobile ability of the robot while the manipulator can reach difficult places where humans cannot reach. A lot of sensors and cameras are placed on the robot so that they aid in the rescue process of disaster-affected areas . The sensors placed include CO2 sensor, IMU, cameras, LiDAR etc. All these sensors and cameras help the operator to identify victims and to gather information on the surroundings. Kinect and LiDAR sensor help in mapping the environment in which the robot glides and to mark the location of detected victims the map.

Self-E

Self-E – Autonomous Wheelchair

Self-E is an advanced wheelchair system capable of autonomous navigation at a low cost and having advanced technology.

It was created to serve people with disabilities for walking. It can be also used for travelling and transport of the old age and the patients in the hospital and other places.

It uses the SLAM method for mapping the environment along with an algorithm for computing the shortest path.

Mapping is done using the LiDAR sensor which helps both in mapping and object detection and avoidance.

Amaran

Amaran – A Robotic Coconut Tree Climber

A Robotic Coconut tree Climber- India got the tag as the second largest coconut producer in the world.

Until recently coconut plucking job conventionally was taken up by socially and economically backward people in these areas.

Due to various government welfare programs and increase in literacy, the number of people taking up this job has dwindled a lot which is one of the main reasons resulting in increase in the price of coconuts.

Autonomous Cart

Intelligent Automated Shopping Cart

Intelligent automated shopping cart shown in Fig.1, which leads customers inside a supermarket to products specified by them without the need for the customers to search for the products on their own.

We have used a variety of packages provided by ROS (Robot Operating System) as well as sensors like LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging), IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) and rotary encoders to solve the problem of SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping).

LiDAR is used for obstacle detection whereas IMU and rotary encoders give the position and orientation of the cart.

An android application has been developed to simplify the user interface for the navigation of the cart.