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Robotics, automation, and autonomous navigation
6 Problem Statements in this Domain (5 Standard + 1 Open Innovation)
Sewer and confined utility-space inspection currently exposes workers to toxic gas, low oxygen, unstable footing, and unpredictable obstruction, and manual entry has caused numerous worker deaths in India — yet available inspection robots are largely designed for clean, structured pipe environments and struggle with the debris, variable pipe conditions, submerged sections, and toxic atmosphere of real Indian sewer infrastructure. A viable robot must navigate genuinely unstructured, obstructed, and hazardous confined spaces while providing inspection data useful for maintenance decisions.
Agricultural drone spraying is gaining traction in flat, open farmland, but hill and terraced farms — common across large parts of India — present significant additional challenges: GPS signal multipath and degradation near terrain features and vegetation, complex 3D terrain requiring altitude adaptation relative to sloped ground rather than a fixed altitude, and tight, irregularly-shaped plots unsuited to standard rectangular flight-path planning. Coordinating multiple drones safely and efficiently in this constrained, GPS-degraded 3D environment is a substantially harder problem than flat-field spraying.
Manual scavenging and manual sewer/septic tank cleaning remain a serious, ongoing occupational hazard causing worker deaths despite being legally prohibited, largely because affordable, effective mechanized/robotic alternatives are not available at the scale needed, especially for smaller septic systems in towns and semi-urban areas that cannot afford large specialized desludging vehicles. A viable robotic system must handle genuinely variable, unstructured, wet, and toxic sludge environments in tanks of inconsistent size, shape, and access, at a cost accessible to smaller municipalities.
Indian municipal solid waste is typically collected as a highly heterogeneous, wet, contaminated mix (unlike the pre-segregated dry recyclables assumed by many imported waste-sorting robots), including hazardous items (broken glass, medical waste, batteries) mixed in with organic and recyclable material — making both visual identification and safe physical handling substantially harder than in cleanly segregated waste streams. A viable robotic sorting approach must reliably identify and safely separate hazardous items while handling wet, degraded, visually ambiguous mixed waste, not idealized clean recyclables.
Regular underwater inspection of dam structures (spillways, intake structures, submerged sections) is critical for dam safety but is rarely performed thoroughly because most Indian reservoirs have extremely poor underwater visibility due to silt, and diver-based inspection is dangerous, slow, and depth/visibility-limited. Autonomous underwater vehicles designed for clear-water applications (offshore inspection, research) generally rely heavily on optical vision, which fails almost entirely in India's typically turbid reservoir water, requiring a fundamentally different sensing and navigation approach.
Have your own innovation in Robotics & Automation? Design and prototype your own autonomous mobile robot (AMR), drone navigation and mapping system, robotic arm manipulator, pipeline inspection crawler, or computer-vision enabled robotic automation system.