Online Workshop on Current Trends in Industrial Robotics by TCS Research

The Neotia University (TNU) in association with TCS Research is organizing an Online workshop on Current Trends in Industrial Robotics. The workshop was organized by the Department of Robotics and Automation of The School of Science and Technology.

The Workshop was inaugurated by the respected Pro-Vice-Chancellor of TNU, Prof. Dr. Susanta Mitra, and was followed by the technical sessions by the three eminent speakers of the Workshop, Dr. Arup Kumar Sadhu, Mr. Ranjan Dasgupta, and Dr. Titas Bera. The workshop was organized for the Engineering Students & Faculty members, the workshop helped to understand the current trends and development in Industrial Robotics.

Dr. Arup Kumar Sadhu is working with TCS Research as a scientist. His research interests include, but are not limited to, Reinforcement Learning, Game Theory, Mechanism design, Artificial intelligence, Path planning for robots, and Task Scheduling for robots. He has many international conferences, journal papers, and patents. The topic of his Speech was Planning and Coordination between Robots. Coordination and planning are closely related terminologies in the domain of multi-robot systems. They mutually complement each other to address complex real-world problems. The speech dealt with the cooperation of robots/robotic agents to efficiently complete a complex task. The next speaker was Mr. Ranjan Dasgupta.

Mr. Ranjan Dasgupta is currently working as a Senior Scientist in Research and Innovation at Tata Consultancy Services Limited, Kolkata. His research interests include robot kinematics and dynamics modeling, nonlinear and adaptive control of uncertain under-actuated systems specifically in the area of multi-rotor and multi-DOF manipulation systems. The topic of his Speech was Nonlinear Adaptive Control and Design of a Tracking Controller for a Quad-Rotorcraft. Adaptive control techniques can provide an automatic tuning procedure in a closed-loop for the controller parameters. The discussion of the session started from a simple system and ended with a complex one like an under-actuated multi-rotor system.

Dr. Titas Bera joined TCS Research & Innovation, India as a research scientist. His research interests include multi-agent systems, path planning, and control of UAVs. The topic of his Speech was Motion Planning based on Random Walks. Sampling-based probabilistic roadmap planners (PRM) have been successful in the motion planning of robots with higher degrees of freedom but may fail to capture the connectivity of the configuration space in scenarios with a critical narrow passage. The discussion was about a method or technique which is robust to the changes in the parameters related to the structure of the narrow passage, thus giving an additional generality.

In the end, the Vote of Thanks was delivered by Prof. Dr. Ankush Ghosh, HOD, Robotics & Automation, TNU.