Finnish kit vendor Nokia will launch a Centre of Excellence for Networked Robotics in India to promote research in robotics, 5G and AI for ‘socially relevant use cases‘.

Developed alongside the Indian Institute of Science, the Nokia Centre of Excellence is described as a ‘state-of-the-art network robotics laboratory’ which will promote collaboration between academia, start-ups and general industry in order to develop new tech applications of robotics, 5G and AI for sectors such as emergency management, agriculture and industrial automation.

The research hub will work on 5G based solutions to social problems, and will plug into work being done at Nokia Bell Labs’ in robot orchestration, robot network control and human-robot interaction. IISc will bring to the table its in-house expertise in algorithms, drones and robotic systems.

Some early examples of things the centre will be working on include using 5G drones for remote management of agricultural orchards, collecting information on the area of an emergency situation for analysis before first responders arrive, and anticipating crop fires.

“The ultimate relevance of technology is to find solutions to improve the quality of our lives,” said Professor Rangarajan, Director of IISc. “Collaboration with a global technology leader, Nokia, will go a long way in helping our students to gain knowledge and insights and make significant contributions to the development of innovative and societally relevant 5G use cases. This is a critical initiative and it will help us move closer to finding technology-powered solutions to enrich our lives.”

Sanjay Malik, Senior Vice President and Head of India Market at Nokia added: “Emerging technologies such as the 5G have potential to enable an entirely new array of use cases with a profound societal impact. With Nokia’s rich innovation heritage, we aim to engage with the bright and young minds at IISc to nurture and advance the latest technologies that can benefit communities. We are confident that it will lead to the development of groundbreaking use cases.”

The telecoms industry spent a number of years bigging up 5G as the bringer of a brave new world in which everything will be transformed by low latency connectivity. Perhaps somewhat in response to the fact that the obvious benefits thus far remain elusive to many outside the sector, there have been a few labs like this cropping up which seem to be at least partially about getting a group of boffins together and giving them the assignment of grinding out some useful applications, since they are not being generated in abundance organically. Still, the suggested research here sound practical and useful enough, so it might end up doing just that.

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