IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2013 - 15

INDUSTRIAL ACTIVITIES

STREAM: A Workshop on the
Overview
Use of Robotics
of Robotics in K-12 STEM
Activities
Education
in India (2013)
By Kristen N. Stubbs and Holly A. Yanco

By Madusudanan Sathianarayanan, Manish Chauhan,
Subir Kumar Saha, Suren Kumar, and Venkat Krovi

Third in the series of articles focusing on the state of robotics
and automation (R&A) in the BRICS countries, Brazil, Russia,
India, China, and South Africa, this article provides an
overview of India. The objective of this series is to inform
the readers of the unique challenges of these countries and

T

raditionally robotics and automation (R&A) technologies
have not enjoyed success in the
Indian milieu, partly due to the
prohibitive technological costs and partly
due to the in-parallel availability of an
inexpensive labor force. However, it is
noteworthy that this has not been due to
a shortage of scientific temper to address
challenging problems or the willingness
to apply the most appropriate solution.
As a nation, India is witnessing rapid
industrialization, with a growth rate hovering between 7 and 10% over the past
decade and an eye toward the global
export marketplace. Within this context,
the robotics industry in the country is
worth approximately US$750 million
(compared with a global estimate of
US$17.6 billion) but is expected to grow
at two to two-and-half times the average
global growth rate [1].
In the past decade, R&A technologies have hastened the coming-of-age in
India by helping speed up, simplify, and
enhance the quality of various heavyindustry processes. Defense industrial
applications remain another growing
area for R&A and allied control-system
technologies. Additionally, the rising
affluence is also creating a consumerfocused marketplace for R&A technologies, including the health-care marketplace. Thus, from an overall perspective,
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2013.2283182

Date of publication: 6 December 2013

the solutions they have adopted to solve their problems, and
to facilitate discussions with the interested members of the
community. Please send your comments and feedback to Vice
President of the Industrial Activities Board Raj Madhavan at
raj.madhavan@ieee.org.

the R&A picture in the Indian subcontinent mirrors the diversity and rapidly
changing face of robotics worldwide
(albeit on a smaller scale).
While presenting this overview of
seemingly scant robotics activities
within the Indian subcontinent, one
needs to place this in the broader context of the technological capabilities of a
nation that has successfully developed
an indigenous space and nuclear program. In particular, the technological
capabilities (in robotics, automation,
and control systems) remain captive
within the specific defense/governmental agencies and institutions and not
particularly well publicized. More generally, in the pervasive one-companyfor-life employment paradigm and lack
of significant mobility within the labormarkets, R&A activities have traditionally remained siloed within institutional
and organizational boundaries. Hence,
this overview of robotics activities quite
naturally coalesces around different
organizations/agencies from educational institutions to research and development laboratories to actual specific
industry sector deployments.
The broad categorization follows
along from the source of the technological manpower with academic research
organizations and educational support
laboratories, and then leads into governmental and industrial research, and
development laboratories, educational
and hobby robotics organizations, and

more recently, budding robotics-oriented professional societies. Yet, one
needs to remain cognizant that this is
a mere snapshot of activity at this
instance in time.
As in the rest of the world, various literary and celluloid renditions of robotics
play a critical role in capturing the imagination of young Indians. Additionally,
interest in R&A (and embedded systems
technologies at the lower end) has
proven to be a natural evolution and
extension of the programming paradigm and a natural target for numerous
science, engineering, and technology
career-oriented students each year.
Academic institutions, working in
close collaboration with governmental
and industrial research and development labs, are spearheading the growth
of robotics in India. Much of the early
efforts were led by the robotics labs
within the Indian Institute of Science,
Bangalore, and the Indian Institutes of
Technology (IITs) in Delhi, Bombay,
Madras, Kharagpur, and Kanpur. In
more recent years, these have been
joined by the nascent robotics labs in
the next generation of IITs in addition
to the National Institutes of Technology
(NITs) and the Indian Institute of
Information Technology (IIITs)-all
institutions operating under the auspices of the Ministry of Human
Resource Development. The diversity of
research topics closely parallels the contemporary international research

DECEMBER 2013

*

IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

*

15
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2013
