Vadodara’s university campus gets ‘Mitra’ in humanoid robot

Vadodara: Hundreds of students and their parents are greeted by this ‘friend’ as they enter a city-based education campus these days.
This friend chats with them, guides them and answers their queries related to courses offered or admission process on the campus while dropping some witty one-liners too.
This is the first indigenously built, five feet-tall humanoid robot – ‘Mitra’ – which is grabbing attention at Parul University (PU).
With ‘Mitra’, PU has become country’s first education campus which has started using a humanoid. The humanoid robot developed by a Bengaluru-based robotics startup – Invento Robotics - was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Ivanka Trump at Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES) conference in 2017.
The university has introduced this unique custom-made robot, procured at a cost of Rs11.5 lakh, to provide assistance and guidance to visiting parents, guests, students along with faculties on a day-to-day basis. The robot, which works on artificial intelligence, has been doing an eight-hour patrol on the campus.
‘Mitra’ has adorned multiple roles – giving directions on specific locations such as hospitals, administrative offices, canteens and institute’s buildings to guests.
Also, it acts as a registration platform whereby students, who are new to the campus, can get themselves registered into the networked system at any given time – providing a paperless way of registration, making it an eco-friendly humanoid system.
“Mitra’s services have proven to be of great benefit to our visitors as it has drastically reduced long lines of people who otherwise queue up for various services during this time of the year,” said PU president Dr Devanshu Patel.
Part of Mitra’s coding includes intrinsic human elements of humour, empathy and intelligence so that it can provide a more interpersonal service.
“As part of these human features, Mitra has reception abilities of greeting and handshaking people, he comes across. He has the ability to take photo records of all the people who avail his services and has the memory capacity of keeping such photos for later referencing,” said a PU official, who was involved in its procuring.
The humanoid system is also aimed at providing practical exposure to students of B Tech robotics so that they can see the human and robot interrelation, PU officials said, adding that a real life exposure will go a long way in inspiring students in designing and programming a humanoid system of such great magnitude.
“Mitra is one of the main steps towards ‘Digital India’. The system will allow every person who gets in touch with us to enhance their digital literacy and cultivate a digital mindset among our students as well as those who are in touch with us on a daily basis,” said Patel.