Water-carrying robot brings help to Indian village

On World Water Day, a University of Glasgow computer scientist is highlighting how residents of a remote Indian village have benefited from social robot which helped them with their daily burden of water-gathering. Dr Amol Deshmukh, a research associate in the School of Computing Science, recently completed a project with partners from Amrita University which aimed to explore how a water-carrying robot would affect the lives of villagers in Ayyampathy in southern India. More than half of India's population has no access to tap water in their homes. Instead, they spend a great deal of time and energy every day carrying water from wells, a task which is overwhelmingly performed by women. The research team, who visited the village in November last year, used a four-wheeled device from Clearpath Robotics known as a 'Husky' to help 11 volunteers from Ayyampathy's 200 residents carry water to their houses from the local well. The robot could carry three 20-litre bottles at a time, and communicate using a synthetic male voice. The robot's motion and speech were both controlled by the researchers via remote control.