Realm of the Robots!

Indian Express

In the run – up to the annual fiesta that is Robotix held at Kshitij, Technology Robotix Society has lined up a series of events, workshops and exhibitions at various locations in the country.  With the team spreading out to all corners of India, vast turnouts were witnessed at Bangalore, Nagpur and Ludhiana workshops held during the DP holidays. At the Kalyani hands-on workshop, students learnt to build a  autonomous line following robot in a span of one day.

In more recent news, the annual eagerly awaited Kolkata workshop, held at GD Birla Sabhaghar, in association with Kshitij, was a grand success. Hogged by media spotlights, Technology Robotix Society also held a demonstration of about 15 working robots at Birla Industrial and Technological Museum accompanied by a one-hour session on “Robotics for Beginners” specifically meant for school children which involved the explanation of the making of the simplest manual robot capable of traversal in 4 directions. As the floor was thrown open to questions, the audience, ranging across ages 5 – 50 were bursting with queries ranging from the exact platform for coding in Image Processing to the type of wire to be used for connecting various components of a robot.

Check out the pictures from the workshop here

Hindustan Times

And we aren’t even close to the finish line! A hands – on Image processing Workshop will be held at Techno India, Salt Lake on 6^th November 2011 and we’re in the final rungs of preparation.

As a mark of the high standards in which our workshops are regarded, the yearly inhouse Winter Workshop to be held at this year in December has received IEEE certification. 1^st years at IIT Kharagpur interested in attending the workshop are requested to look out for announcements at www.robotix.in

Meanwhile, registration for our events at Robotix to be held during Kshitij 2012 have begun! Register your team at http://www.ktj.in/#teams

Machines At Work

The “Robotization” of Industrial Processes

- by Samarth Mahajan, Head, Technology Robotix Society, 2011-12

Robots have come a long way – from just manual puppets to entities with microCs coded to process input aspiring towards a brain , to attaining an allmost human like form a.k.a “humanoids”. As we have seen through the ages, dating right back to the pre-historic times, every technological advancement in human history has had an echo in the industrial development and economy of the world. Robots and in general, the whole new area of robotics has had a dynamo effect on world economics.

Industrial robot for processing food products like bread

Industrial robots are employed in almost every manufacturing plant around the world. A plant can never be efficient in production if the work force is not motivated enough to work. Solution : Use robots, they need no motivation! Chores, which are deemed boring, monotonous but mostly ardous to humans are done in split seconds by these world-changing machines.

A 6 - Axis Robot

The development of 5 axis , 6 axis (indicating the degrees of freedom it has) and other variety of robots has led to a revolution in the tasks like welding, machining and assembly of parts which can now be done in a fraction of the time that we, prone to fatigue and mental exhaustion, humans would take.

These robots are not limited only to the manufacturing and civil industry. Mine surveillance, farming, medical treatment, defence, and underwater exploration are just a few examples of activities which are steadily becoming robot dependent.

A mining robot - Line diagram

We, at Robotix, have always tried to create problem statements which are society and industry oriented. Pirate Bay, a manual event at Robotix 2011, is a very good example of application of robotics in the mining/civil sector through the activity of digging. This year too we have created new challenges which, when solved, will have great implications on our progress as a race.

References : 

• Underwater Exploration : http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/arctic/explore/index.html
• Medicine : http://www.moah.org/exhibits/archives/robotman/medicine/medicine.html
• Agriculture : http://www.robotsnob.com/archives/2009/12/fuji-develops-farmbot.php
• Mining : http://www.usmra.com/moleultralight/MOLEUltrLight.htm
• Defence : http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/98/microrobot.html

Bangalore Workshop

Being the first of its kind in Bangalore, this year an introductory workshop about the working of a Line Following robot was conducted at the M.S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology on the 8th of October. In addition the Robotix 2012 events were also publicized and the audience responded enthusiastically to this opportunity to display their Robotics skills.The workshop left the audience asking for more, with many in the audience remaining in touch with the Robotix team eager to learn further. 

Technology Robotix Society is a society under the Technology Students’ Gymkhana, IIT Kharagpur, and does not conduct workshops for profit. Our only objective is to spread robotics across India. We conduct workshops when contacted by students/faculty of various colleges. If you want us to conduct a workshop in your school or college, please contact us at workshops@robotix.in .

Romancing Python : Part 4

About C++ :

Almost everything said for Java also applies for C++, just more so: where Python code is typically 3-5 times shorter than equivalent Java code, it is often 5-10 times shorter than equivalent C++ code! Anecdotal evidence suggests that one Python programmer can finish in two months what two C++ programmers can’t complete in a year. Python shines as a glue language, used to combine components written in C++.

Common Lisp

These languages are close to Python in their dynamic semantics, but so different in their approach to syntax that a comparison becomes almost a religious argument: is Lisp’s lack of syntax an advantage or a disadvantage? It should be noted that Python has introspective capabilities similar to those of Lisp, and Python programs can construct and execute program fragments on the fly. Usually, real-world properties are decisive: Common Lisp is big (in every sense), and the Scheme world is fragmented between many incompatible versions, where Python has a single, free, compact implementation.

With that, we close the Romancing Python series. We hope you have got a substantial introduction to the intricacies of the various programming platforms and will now proceed to attempt coding problem statements in the tongue of your choice!

For an exciting heads up, visit the page for the coding event for ROBOTIX 2012 : http://robotix.in/events/echelon

Romancing Python : Part 3

In this not very long post, lets see how Python, Javascript and Perl compare.

Python’s “object-based” subset is roughly equivalent to JavaScript. Like JavaScript (and unlike Java), Python supports a programming style that uses simple functions and variables without engaging in class definitions. However, for JavaScript, that’s all there is. Python, on the other hand, supports writing much larger programs and better code reuse through a true object-oriented programming style, where classes and inheritance play an important role.

Python and Perl come from a similar background (Unix scripting, which both have long outgrown), and sport many similar features, but have a different philosophy. Perl emphasizes support for common application-oriented tasks, e.g. by having built-in regular expressions, file scanning and report generating features. Python emphasizes support for common programming methodologies such as data structure design and object-oriented programming, and encourages programmers to write readable (and thus maintainable) code by providing an elegant but not overly cryptic notation. As a consequence, Python comes close to Perl but rarely beats it in its original application domain; however Python has an applicability well beyond Perl’s niche.

Stay tuned for more as you go about choosing your own favourite coding platform.

Romancing Python : Part 2

In this and a series of following articles, we take you through brief comparisons between programming languages concentrate on language issues only so you can figure out which one is best for your use. In practice, the choice of a programming language is often dictated by other real-world constraints such as cost, availability, training, and prior investment, or even emotional attachment. Since these aspects are highly variable, it seems a waste of time to consider them much for this comparison.

Python VS Java

Python programs are generally expected to run slower than Java programs, but they also take much less time to develop. Python programs are typically 3-5 times shorter than equivalent Java programs. This difference can be attributed to Python’s built-in high-level data types and its dynamic typing. For example, a Python programmer wastes no time declaring the types of arguments or variables, and Python’s powerful polymorphic list and dictionary types, for which rich syntactic support is built straight into the language, find a use in almost every Python program. Because of the run-time typing, Python’s run time must work harder than Java’s. For example, when evaluating the expression a+b, it must first inspect the objects a and b to find out their type, which is not known at compile time. It then invokes the appropriate addition operation, which may be an overloaded user-defined method. Java, on the other hand, can perform an efficient integer or floating point addition, but requires variable declarations for a and b, and does not allow overloading of the + operator for instances of user-defined classes.
For these reasons, Python is much better suited as a “glue” language, while Java is better characterized as a low-level implementation language. In fact, the two together make an excellent combination. Components can be developed in Java and combined to form applications in Python; Python can also be used to prototype components until their design can be “hardened” in a Java implementation. To support this type of development, a Python implementation written in Java is under development, which allows calling Python code from Java and vice versa. In this implementation, Python source code is translated to Java bytecode (with help from a run-time library to support Python’s dynamic semantics).

Next up : We tell you more about Python’s stand against Javascript!