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#News(General) [ via IoTForIndiaGroup ]
In February this year, in Thiruvananthapuram, with at least a dozen cameras on him, Sateesh S. Nair tentatively punched a series of red buttons on a large arachnidian machine — India’s first ‘manhole cleaning robot’ called Bandicoot. Nine engineers, all in their early 20s, the creators of the robot, looked on a little nervously: this was going to be the first public demonstration of Bandicoot, still very much a beta version. Nair’s eyes shifted between the screen on the machine and a manhole a few feet away as the robot juddered to life. A spindly pneumatic arm lunged out and clamped open the manhole lid and four aluminium legs plunged into the abyss. A loudspeaker blared music, a scooper ‘hand’ emerged from the bowels with a sizeable heap of sludge and deposited it into a bucket.
Vimal Govind, the CEO of the Genrobotics team that created Bandicoot, had just finished designing a ‘power exoskeleton’ — inspired by James Cameron’s Avatar — a 14-ft machine that mimics human movements, when the Kerala government approached him to design a sewer-cleaning robot.
With funds from the Kerala Startup Mission, and several months of intensive research, they came up with a ‘spider robot’ that can stretch its legs and immerse a camera into the manhole so that the operator can guide its automated arm to shovel debris or direct a water jet into sewer lines to unclog them.
There were R&D problems: the team discovered, for instance, that manholes are not consistent in shape or size: “some are square, some are round; some cylindrical, some conical, their diameters vary,” says Govind. Bandicoot today is no longer the odd mangle of tubes and wires it started as. It has been simplified in terms of user interface, it is more compact and made of a lighter carbon fibre. And outside Kerala, the robot has been acquired in Tamil Nadu’s Kumbakonam town and in Anantapur district in Andhra Pradesh.
Sewer Croc, Bandicoot and 14 other machines are in various stages of development and deployment, with no help from the Centre
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