Stoch, country’s first commercial
walking robot, uses machine learning to move around
The
robot is the size of a small dog with four legs and a thick but flexible spine.
When connected to a battery, it starts walking on slender, articulated limbs,
like a canine. It even has a ‘face’ that looks vaguely like that of a pug. The
developers at the Robert Bosch Centre for Cyber-physical Systems at the Indian
Institute of Science (IISc) are calling it ‘Stoch’ and they say it’s on target
to become the country’s first commercial “walking” robot.
Stoch
has been under development since January last year. The first version was
displayed a month ago at Aero India — it was heavy-footed and clumsy. A sleeker
second version was developed just two weeks ago and a third will be ready in
three months. A commercial variant is about a year away. The robot uses machine
learning to figure out how to walk by itself. Specifically, it uses
reinforcement learning, where the machine learns over time to take the best
possible action in return for the best reward. After several million attempts —
performed in computer simulation — the robot learns to walk. Some Indian
Institutes of Technology (IITs) and IISc have been working on such devices in
the past few years. There aren’t any commercial versions in the market and no
institution other than IISc has a prototype that uses reinforcement learning to
teach the robot to walk.
The
IISc project started when a student, Shounak Bhattacharya, did a master’s
project in the department of mechanical engineering. After the project, the
Bosch Centre at IISc took over development by bringing together professors from
other departments. It also hired engineers and put together a development team.
“We wanted to explore the field of data-driven robotics,” said Bharadwaj
Amrutur, professor of electrical engineering at IISc and chairman of the Robert
Bosch Centre.
Data-driven
robotics is a set of technologies that use data to get a robot to learn by
itself. As the IISc project got off the ground, it was joined by Shishir
Kolathaya from Georgia Tech University. Kolathaya, who has been working with
walking robots since the undergraduate level, studied legged robots for his
PhD.
When
he joined, the Bosch Centre had a non-working prototype. The first real
prototype — Stoch 1 — didn’t carry batteries. Stoch 2 was twice as powerful,
was designed to carry batteries and could walk for 15 minutes without being
plugged into an electrical outlet. The third version will improve on looks and
be even more powerful. The commercial prototype, when ready, will be bundled
with an application.
The
Bosch team is mulling several applications — climbing coconut trees, doing
surveys in difficult terrain, inspecting construction sites and so on. The
project now has five engineers, apart from some faculty members. “We are
planning to put a software development kit for people to programme,” says
Dhaivat Dholakiya, who is technical associate of the project.
Source:THE ECONOMIC TIMES-15th March,2019
