Need a robot to serve food and water and deliver medicines to quarantined patients? Annapoorna does all that as well as facilitates remote communication between the patients and healthcare professionals. It is also operated either by a joystick or by using a smartphone app, either with Bluetooth or WiFi.

While Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham remains closed as per the Government lockdown, its professors and HODs continue to develop more and more innovations aimed at helping society deal with the novel Coronavirus.

Most recently, Humanitarian Technology (HuT) Lab, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amritapuri campus, headed by Dr. Rajesh Kannan Megalingam (Assistant Professor, Department of Electronics and Communication, School of Engineering, Amritapuri), has unveiled robot prototypes that are ready to help in places unsafe for humans to tread.

This remotely operated robot using WiFi can serve food, water and medicine to patients in isolated wards. It also has a telemedicine facility and enables patients in isolated wards to interact with doctors/nurses remotely. It will be very useful for front line workers who supply food, water and medicine to the patients during the pandemic/ epidemic in hospitals.

“The whole purpose of Amrita HuT Lab is to make robots for humanitarian ends. Robots that can assist sick people or that can do jobs that are unsafe for humans,” said Dr. Rajesh Kannan from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham. “For example, some of our early successes were with the creation of a low-cost self-driving wheelchair and a Cocobot that harvests coconuts from places so high that if a human climber were to fall, he would certainly be killed. So, as soon as we realized the seriousness of COVID-19, we began working on robots connected with the pandemic.”