Dr Amol Deshmukh, a research associate in the School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow has recently completed a project with partners from Amrita University in Kerala, which aimed to explore how a water-carrying robot would affect the lives of villagers in Ayyampathy in Southern India. On World Water Day (22 March) he highlighted how residents of the remote Indian village have benefited from social robot which helped them with their daily burden of water-gathering.
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. The researchers were keen to see not just how much labour could be saved by offering villagers the use of the Husky, but also how people who had never seen a robot for themselves before would interact with it.
The robot communicated with the volunteers, 10 of whom were women and one of whom was a man and who ranged in age between 15 and 70, to encourage them to place the water jugs on top of it and to show it the way to their homes. Once the volunteers decanted the water into their storage containers at home, the robot thanked them and reminded them to wash their hands before their next meal.
Dr Deshmukh said: “After several days of using the Husky, we surveyed each of the participants about their perceptions of the robot and how helpful they found it.
“Every one of them said the robot made their lives easier, and they unanimously reported that they enjoyed working with the robot. Interestingly, they were also unanimous on the robot being ‘alive’, despite being aware that it was being controlled remotely.
“We also asked if they thought the robot had a gender. More than a third of participants perceived it as ‘female’ although it communicated with a male-sounding voice and had no other gender-coded features, primarily because water-carrying is done mainly by women in their village.
“It’s clear that labour-saving devices like these bring real benefits to remote communities, and we’re keen to do more work in the future with our partners in India to explore these issues in more depth.”
Akshay Nagarajan from Amrita University said "It is making an effort to understand the challenges of introducing robotic solutions in a real life rural setting. This is an essential step towards informing design decisions for robotic products that seek to address the populations at the bottom of the economic pyramid."
This main research was carried out by Dr. Amol Deshmukh himself from University of Glasgow along with Sooraj Krishna, Nagarajan Akshay, Vennila Vilvanathan, Sivaprasad J. V., and Rao R. Bhavani from Amrita University, Kerala, India. This research was funded by Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) and Amrita University, Kerala, India.
