November 16, 2020
Nokia recently announced that it will collaborate with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), to establish the Nokia Centre of Excellence (CoE) for Networked Robotics.
The robotics facility, which aligns with the government’s ‘Startup India’ initiative aims to promote research in areas such as robotics and AI to solve socially relevant use cases across areas such as emergency management, agriculture and industrial automation. The state-of-the-art network robotics laboratory will be available to the IISc community to work on the AI projects.
According to the blog post, it will also foster the engagement and cooperation between academia, startups and industry ecosystem partners in research and development of use cases
While Nokia along with Nokia Bell Labs’ will share technical expertise in network innovations robot orchestration, robot network controller and human-robot interaction, IISc will engage its cross-disciplinary faculty and researchers to provide its in-house expertise in algorithms, drones and robotic systems.
The CoE will explore use cases such as:
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- Use of drones for remote management of agricultural orchards to promote water conservation and avoid human contact with pesticides
- Drones for anticipating crop fires
- Drones using a 5G-enabled wide-area network to gather situational information to quickly access affected areas during disaster relief and save lives
Professor G Rangarajan, Director, IISc, said, “The ultimate relevance of technology is to find solutions to improve the quality of our lives. Collaboration with a global technology leader, Nokia, will go a long way in helping our students to gain knowledge and insights and make significant contributions to the development of innovative and societally relevant 5G use cases.”
He also said that it is a critical initiative and will help move closer to finding technology-powered solutions to enrich our lives. The collaboration will help IISc in capacity building and human resources development in the cutting-edge technology of robotics, 5G and autonomous systems.
Sanjay Malik, Senior Vice President and Head of India Market, Nokia, said, “Emerging technologies such as the 5G have potential to enable an entirely new array of use cases with a profound societal impact. With Nokia’s rich innovation heritage, we aim to engage with the bright and young minds at IISc to nurture and advance the latest technologies that can benefit communities. We are confident that it will lead to the development of groundbreaking use cases.”
The Nokia CoE at IISc will also facilitate close interaction with all the stakeholders of the ecosystem for the exchange of ideas and symbiotic development of end-to-end use cases. It also plans to host symposia for academia and industry and organise hackathons for startups.
IISc had earlier collaborated with Wipro to build an autonomous car for the Indian roads.