R & D Initiatives

E Yantra lab, IIT Bombay :

E Yantra lab, IIT Bombay envisages E-Yantra to harness young intellectual talent to create utility based robotic applications for usage across a variety of applications such as agriculture, manufacturing, defence, home, city maintenance and services industries.
The Indian Institute of Bombay (IITB), a leading science and technology institution in the country, today announced the launch of 'E-Yantra'- a pan India challenge on robotics. What sets this initiative apart from others is its format. While other challenges expect students to build their own robots, E-Yantra presents them with a robot developed at IIT-Bombay, and encourages them to develop solutions to pre-set tasks using these robots. This makes robotics accessible to students - registered in an Engineering College as undergraduates - across a variety of disciplines such as Computer Science, Information Technology, Electrical and Electronics and Mechanical Engineering.

IIT Bombay envisages the 'E-Yantra' platform to harness the intellectual talent of young India to create utility based robotic applications for usage across variety of applications such as: agriculture, manufacturing, defense, home, city maintenance and services industries. The overall mission is to grow a rich eco-system of ideas and applications that can propel India's growth curve and productivity through intelligent funnelling of robotics in daily living built upon an existing pool of knowledge developed by students working on such projects at engineering colleges in the area of embedded systems.

The Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) sponsors E-Yantra under the National Mission for ICT in Education (NMEICT) program. The initiative seeks to provide hands-on learning-infrastructure to engineering students who have limited access to labs and mentors. With an overall objective to create a practical outlook to help students recognize problems they observe and solve them using a little robot developed by the IIT-Bombay team over the last 5 years. Professors Kavi Arya and Krithi Ramamritham of the institute's CSE Department have conceptualized E-Yantra after years of experience in teaching embedded systems.

Traditionally when students wished to do a robotics project, they had to first build a robot, then work on the project, often faltering at the first hurdle. The resultant project was often a crude robot and little else. Now they have a commodity robot and an existing open source code base to draw upon to model a sophisticated solution to a problem.

The 'open-source' E-Yantra initiative by IIT Bombay aims to create the next generation of Indian embedded systems engineers with a practical outlook to help provide practical solutions to some of our problems. Solving a problem in the small is the way even 'grown up' engineers first approach a real problem - this helps us to understand things better to provide a better thought out solution.

Ref: http://www.iitb.ac.in/CSEYantra/Yantra.htm


Aakash Lab, sponsored by IIT Bombay :

Every Indian learner desires a chance to receive the highest quality education. Scarcity of trained teachers hinders this aspiration. Difficulty in accessing the best educational contents, in an affordable manner,further accentuates the problem.

Effective use of Information and Communication Technologies helps in significantly addressing these twin issues. Aakash Tablet, launched by Government of India, is emerging as a key ICT tool for this purpose. When used in conjunction with the high speed network of NKN, Aakash has a great potential to become a ubiquitous and effective ICT tool for students and teachers.

Aakash project at IIT Bombay is dedicated to the development of useful applications and contents for use with Aakash. It attempts to empower teachers by using a unique blend of technology, e-contents, and an innovative pedagogy.

While the main focus of this project is on engineering education, it is proposed to use the creative talent of these professional students and teachers to develop applications and contents for all levels of education, including school education in Indian languages.