Joydeep Biswas Builds Robots to Navigate the Real World

March 4, 2020 • by Cason Hunwick

Joydeep Biswas leads the Autonomous Mobile Robotics Laboratory (AMRL) at UT

Robotic car

Profile pic of Biswas

Biswas has extensive experience building and programming self-navigating bots. He built a self-balancing robot reminiscent of Star Wars, coached a team of high-speed soccer-playing bots and most recently developed race cars that execute coordinated high-speed maneuvers.

We met with Biswas to discuss his academic career, robotics research and his thoughts on how the future of robotics may involve humans and robots working together.

Tell me about some of your early robotics projects at IIT Bombay. What did you learn from those?

As an undergraduate at IIT Bombay, I was exposed to this whole new world of robotics where it wasn't just building a physical thing – these are physical things which can actually move in an environment and interact with people. That was mind-blowing to me.

For my undergraduate project, I decided that I wanted to build a single-wheel balancing robot. The particular mechanism which I chose is what's called a reaction wheel. There's a heavy brass disc inside combined with sensors that can detect whether the robot is falling to the left or to the right and spin the disc the opposite direction to right the robot. I also designed it such that this entire system was enclosed in a transparent, self-contained hub.

The control systems that you use to balance this kind of single wheel robot are similar to what you would use on the BB8 droid (from Star Wars).

After completing your Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon and a position as an assistant professor at UMass Amherst, what brought you to Texas?

The fact that robotics is a big focus of research here. There is also significant support from the department, the college, the university and other sponsors to grow this area and do ambitious things. And there's the new building, the Anna Hiss gym, which is being renovated and a large part of the space over there will be for robotics.

We're looking forward to deploying all of our robots in the new space. In fact, I've been working with the architects and the building managers to put in electronics so that our robots can wirelessly request elevators in the building.

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