Vigyan Yuva awardee Prabhu Rajagopal: Robotic inspectors of infrastructure
Rajagopal, a professor of mechanical engineering at IIT Madras, won the award for his work with technologies for remote assessment of condition of infra assets.
Prabhu Rajagopal, a professor of mechanical engineering at IIT Madras, is the winner of this year’s Vigyan Yuva Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar award in the newly introduced category of Technology and Innovation. He talks about his work with technologies for the assessment of the condition of infrastructure assets remotely.
What I do
I work primarily on sensors and robotics, particularly for nondestructive evaluation and maintenance of infrastructure assets. For example, we develop robots that are sent into pipelines to assess their condition, or into dam reservoirs to inspect them for their integrity.
I specialise in guided ultrasonics and submersible robotics. Such robots can be used to inspect petroleum or municipal pipelines, or dams and bridges. My PhD is in ultrasonic technologies for assessment of structural integrity. Remote inspections can be performed either using guided acoustics (that’s also one of my specialisation areas) or using normal ultrasound but with a robot.
How I do it
In the industry, there is a pressing demand for performing ultrasonic inspections remotely, for example deep underwater, or at places where you have very high temperatures, radiation, or very high pressure. Based on the conditions in which the robots are going to operate, we design and fabricate them, and test them first in mock conditions and then in real conditions before releasing them for operations.
The payload can be visual cameras, thermal cameras, acoustic cameras, or acoustic sensors. I have developed novel waveguide and feature-guided wave sensors. The information collected by robots can be either transmitted live or recorded for retrieval later. Once we have that information, we analyse it and conclude whether the structure is okay or has defects.
Among the robots I have designed is HomoSEP, which aims to eliminate manual scavenging. This robot is deployed in septic tanks, at the bottom of which the sludge has accumulated into a hard substance. HomSEPs go inside and mechanically stir the content and homogenise it, after which a machine that is integrated sucks out the contents.
I am very passionate about startups and have created five to date. We created the first of these, Planys, because the oil and gas industry, Reliance in particular, wanted us to inspect storage tanks using robots. We developed technologies in the laboratory, then created a startup and commercialised the technology. Today the startup is serving the oil and gas industry in India and abroad with these solutions. My other startups, too, license my innovations and take my research to deployment on the field such Solinas for sanitation robotics, and Xyma for waveguide sensors. I am excited about the prospect of applying distributed ledger technologies in engineering and healthcare, being commercialised by my most recent startup, Plenome.