Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics

The Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR) was established on 17 October 1986, as an R&D lab under the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).  Situated at Bangalore, the charter of duties of CAIR is to conduct basic and applied research in the fields of information sciences, artificial intelligence, robotics and automation with emphasis on defence requirements.  The thrust areas of CAIR are as follows:   

  •          Artificial Intelligence 

  •          Robotics 

  •           Neural Networks 

  •           Computer Vision

  •           Virtual Reality             

  •           Control Systems 

  •           Signal Processing

  •           Embedded Systems

  •           Communication and Information Security

  •           Tactical Communication Systems

  •           Command & Control Systems

CAIR is unique in combining a wide variety of activities from the theoretical to the applied in a broad spectrum of areas. The aim of CAIR is to create an intellectually stimulating atmosphere with excellent computing and library facilities. CAIR is a 200-strong lab with  equal emphasis on technology development and state-of-art systems development.

Artificial Intelligence

Pilot Associate Kernel: It is a toolbox for developing concurrent hierarchical applications with real-time constraints. It is developed on a Sun Spark station using posix with real-time features of the Solaris operating system. It provides features for event-based programming in a multitasking environment. It also provides methods for control, communication and sychronisation between tasks.

Intelligent Warning Manager: For managing and displaying warnings to the pilot. The warning manager reasons with the set of warnings and displays only those are important to the pilot based on the warning knowledge provided to the warning manager.

Robot Path Planning: Software for finding a 2-dimensional path for a mobile robot with static obstacles, which can have arbitrary (nonconvex) polygonal shapes. The path planning is done in the configuration space using a visibility graph and through free space decomposition techniques.

Network Security System: For service authentication a wrapper program has been used to facilitate transparent service (e.g. telnet, ftp etc) and host (IP number, host name) based authentication before providing/denying the service. For clear text transmission over the network, For countering threats, stream-based modules have been implemented to encrypt complete network sessions such as telnet, rlogin etc.
      

Robotics

Controllers and Drovers for Robots: A PC based controller using a motion controller IC (HCTL 1100) has been developed. Another controller in which the closed loop control is at the PC level has been developed. Besides this, electric drives for DC and stepper motors providing the appropriate power levels to the motors to be used for robotic application has been developed.

Intelligent Wheel Chair: Developed for physically handicapped persons. Three different configurations, viz.

                     A voice operated wheelchair

                     Intelligent wheelchair which utilizes a model of the room (built into its knowledge base for path planning.

                     A camera system to get information about the room

Neural Networks

Information Theory: Research has continued into the encoding and propagation of information in neural networks leading to the formulation of a new algorithm for designing neural networks.

Hardware for Neural Networks: The emphasis of neural networks hardware development at CAIR is on demonstrating the feasibility of using off-the-shelf DSP hardware for building neural networks. A single layer of a neural network involving 1024 neurons with 256 inputs each has been designed and tested.

Statistical Physics Methods: Neural networks models have been given a systematic and theoretical basis in the space of interactions approach of Gardner et al, using statistical mechanics techniques

Control Systems
As part of the National Control Law Team the control group at CAIR is involved in the development of the flight control laws for the Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) Technology Demonstrator (TD-1)

In Flight Simulation-2 Programme of the LCA: The USAF F-16 Variable Stability Research Aircraft (VISTA) operated by Calspan Corporation. Buffalo, USA was used to simulate the LCA control laws in flight. This in-flight simulation session was primarily used to evaluate the LCA control laws for the up and away flight phase. The tasks used to evaluate the control laws included close formation flying, air-to-air tracking the general manouvers.

Design of Structural Notch Filters Based on SCT-1 Experiments: Designed notch filters based on the structural coupling tests (SCT-1) on LCA

Autopilot Control Laws for LCA (TD-2): Study on the Autopilot control laws for L|CA Technology Demonstrator 2 (TD-2) phase was carried out.

  Contact:

  • sitaram@cair.res.in
  • http://www.cair.res.in/