The All India Robotics Association (AIRA), a not-for-profit trade body of robotic enterprises, was launched here on Tuesday to make India the global leader in robotics production and technologies. Harshitha Puvvala, Founder and President of AIRA, said the body, the first in India, will work to support, nurture and create robotics business opportunities in the country. The other goals are to create and standardise robotics education curriculum, standardised design technologies for robot designing, make India a global robotics manufacturer, and establish a world-class robotics centre and museum in Hyderabad, all with a single goal to create a business export path of $350 million by 2022. At the launch event, Jayesh Ranjan, Principal Secretary, Information Technology, Electronics and Communications, government of Telangana, said that during the lockdown many manufacturers using industrial robots have overcome manpower shortage and continued uninterrupted production. The power of robots is also being increased by adding Artificial Intelligence, because of which robots are also becoming intelligent now, Jayesh said.

Information and communication technologies have contributed to the social and cognitive stimulation of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This seems to be partly because children with ASD are more comfortable with predictive and repetitive behaviours [1], which can be implemented through algorithms. In particular, artificial intelligence algorithms are used in various fields, from language or gesture recognition to image classification [2]. These functions are convenient for a system to interact with a human being. Furthermore, robots seem to prove useful with autistic children because of simpler face expressions than those of human beings [3]. Robots can perform gesture imitation learning [4]. For a gesture to be recognized, the human body must first be correctly represented. Joint angles and joint positions can be used to represent human motion in spaces more suitable than the Euclidian one.

Dr. Agyeya Tripathi has completed his Ph.D. and holds a Masters degree in Business Administration and another Masters in Electronics and Communication. He is a national resource person for Financial Inclusion under National Rural Livelihood Mission, Ministry of Rural Development, Government of India. Dr. Agyeya Tripathi has completed his Ph.D. and holds a Masters degree in Business Administration and another Masters in Electronics and Communication.