Prashanth Palakurthi, an Alumnus of BITS Pilani, is the Founder and CEO of Reflexis Systems. He joined BITS Pilani in 1978. His wife Anuradha, the founder of Juju Productions, is a professional singer, performer and radio personality in the United States. She joined BITS Pilani in 1984.

 

Anuradha and Prashanth have made a commitment to contribute at least $1 million USD for a centre named Anuradha and Prashanth Palakurthi Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (APPCAIR).

The objectives of the Centre for Materials Science and Technology are to develop and implement projects related to fibre-reinforced plastic composite materials as well as those related to other engineering materials such as metals, ceramics and polymers. The Centre also undertakes mechanical and non-destructive testing of various engineering materials for evaluating their mechanical properties and for evaluating defects such as cracks, voids, delamination, inclusions etc. Other activities include developing courses related to Materials Science and Technology and organizing Conferences/Seminars/Workshops/Short Courses in this area and to provide consultancy related to testing/development and analysis in the field of material science and technology.

The testing facilities available at the Centre include Universal Testing Machine, Hounsfield Tensometer, various hardness testing machines such as Brinell, Rockwell, and Vickers Hardness Testers, Rotating Bending Fatigue Testing Machine, Combined Bending and Torsion Fatigue Testing Machine, Circular Polariscope, Strain-gauge testing facility, Izod and Charpy Impact Testing Machines, X-Ray Diffractometer, Ultrasonic Flaw Detectors, Liquid Penetrant Test kit, Magnetic Crack Detector, Eddy Current Tester etc.The Centre is also well equipped with computational facilities. Advanced software packages for Finite Element Analysis and for micro and macro analysis of composites materials (e.g. PROMAL) are available at the Centre.

 

 

This centre was established with financial support from the University Grants Commission, New Delhi.

Objectives and scope of the Centre:

The objectives of the centre are to (I) conceive, develop, and implement renewable energy application and environment protection projects, (ii) develop courses and organize awareness creation programs, (iii) collaborate with national and international organizations and institutions in the areas of renewable energy education, training and technology development. The Centre is presently collaborating with MNES, IREDA, REDA, ARTES Institute, of Flensburg University, Germany, and CEER of SPIC Science Foundation, Chennai. Centre is actively involved in setting up performance evaluation of parabolic solar cookers, solar hot water system, solar still and fuel cells and setting up of an Energy Park.

The objective of this Centre is to develop prototypes that provide greater intelligence and higher versatility for robotic tasks under ever-changing constraints of the environment. This objective is set forth to make Indian industry competitive by developing indigenous technical skills, manpower and innovative spirit. Each prototype is developed in four different stages: (i) conceptualization, (ii) algorithmic development and verification in simulated environment, (iii) real-time testing and (iv) integration to automated system. The CRIS is very well equipped and is aiming to explore the possibilities of creating virtual intelligence in animated systems. The new computing systems will be based upon the virtual cognitive machines for solving the real world perception, reasoning and decision making problems. The research group of CRIS has its members from Electrical & Electronics, Instrumentation, Mechanical and Computer Science. Besides faculty members, many students from various disciplines work on different projects at CRIS for their doctoral thesis, M.E. dissertations and first degree thesis.

The Centre for Robotics has collaborations with CAIR, Bangalore, BARC, Mumbai and University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, U.S.A. Current activities of this Centre are in areas such as mechanical design and fabrication of articulated SCARA and direct drive manipulators, autonomous guided vehicles for uneven terrains and walking robots; dynamic control of robot arm, adaptive and robust control, modeling and control using neural and fuzzy neural networks; real-time control using DSP and micro controller based controller card; path planning, development of infra-red and ultrasonic based obstacle avoidance module, fusion of vision with ultrasonic based sensing system, global and local path planning in both static and dynamic environment; robotic vision, visuo-motor coordination, visual tracking, active vision and object recognition; intelligent system design, machine learning, computation and virtual reality.

This Centre has been set up in Collaboration with MOTOROLA INDIA LTD. The objectives of the Centre is to impart detailed understanding of important features of embedded controller architectures and familiarizing advanced concepts in the field of embedded controllers through

The infrastructure of the centre includes Pentium machines, Micro controller Modular Evaluation Systems, Micro controller Development Systems, Emulators, Assemblers and Cross compilers for various micro controller families, DSP processors, logic analyzer and other bench equipments.

 

The Centre is also collaborating with ST MICROELECTRONICS in this area. The company has gifted two of their ST-7 emulators useful for embedded system design.

 

 

Apart from the centres described above, the following specialized laboratories have been established with a view to strengthen research and development in the respective areas: