IIT's robots chip in engineering education

My colleague, Krithi Ramamritham, and I teach a postgraduate course at IIT-Bombay entitled "Embedded Systems (software)" denoting the technology of embedding computers where we don't usually see a computer - this refers to modern devices such as mobile phones, iPods, washing machines, automobiles and such like. The challenge of building these systems is distinct from those in building conventional systems such as banking software, spreadsheets, wordprocessors and so on.

For instance, these systems are typically "reactive" - a technical term referring to "real-time" reactions to stimuli in an environment. The systems are usually "safety-critical" (but not always) such as pacemakers, reactor control systems, avionics systems, etc. where a failure in meeting a deadline for processing might result in a disaster. Whereas conventional systems tolerate delay - such as in our spreadsheet calculations. Realtime systems can't afford to miss deadlines. However, there are other constraints such as size, power consumption, cost and so on. Our course deals with the challenges of building such systems.

When we taught this course through IIT's Distance Education Program we found the absence of a lab made it difficult to teach the material to our remote students. When students can't play and experiment with devices to make lights flash and devices move, it's difficult to spark their imagination enough to appreciate the material being taught. The remote centres, being hosted in engineering colleges typically didn't have lab facilities or the staff to help teach such material.

We thought it would be great if a student could teach herself with just a "virtual mini lab" and a PC connected to the internet? This lead us to the "lab-in-a-box" idea and and then we came up with a "mini-robot" idea. With a little robot, essentially a "microcontroller development kit on wheels" we could give the right kind of experience. However, most educational robots on the market were imported and cost anything upwards of Rs.25,000. We felt a keen need for a low-cost robot for educational purposes. We then set to work on what became known as the Firebird series of low-cost educational robots.

With the help of an inspired colleague, and gifted robotist, Sachitanand Malewar, winner of several domestic and international Robocon contests, we designed from scratch a low-cost educational robot for teaching embedded systems. Having tried generations of robots on several generations of students we plan to deploy these widely this year in teaching our embedded systems course through IIT's CDEEP (Centre for Distant Engineering Education Program). This is now a network of some 65 remote centres (RCs) spread through the length and breadth of India.

We anticipate that some 500-1000 students might take the course this time and we are in the process of gearing up for this super challenge. The DNA newspaper recently did a story on us entitled "IIT's robots chip in engineering education" which gave their readership an idea of what's we're doing in this space. This should be an exciting year for us - so watch this space and get yourself a robot from a dynamic little startup called "Nex Robotics".