A Robot By IIT Madras Students Will Grab Waste Instead Of Human

Sewage cleaners’ duties from cleaning manholes to handling sewer lines are never easy, or even dangerous in many cases. That’s especially right for those who are living in India. Reasons behind it are because we lack a suitable workforce as well as effective tools to do these kinds of jobs, but not human workers.

At present, about 8,00,000 people with low income have earned their life by cleaning sewers in the nation and among those, there are about 23,000 deaths per year. It’s not difficult to find out the reasons for these deaths: They lack necessary safety equipment to protect themselves from asphyxiation and mixture of the existing poisonous gases in sewage lines.

The issue has attracted the attention of IIT Madras students who decided to develop an automated system to make sewage tanks clean and save more lives of sewage cleaners. They called the system ‘SEPoy Septic Tank Robot’. The robot will try to do its duties in the lab in April 2019, and it is expected to be applied in practice three months later, in July. If a research group proves the potentials of their initiative, state governments may adopt it for use.

The Bandicoot designed by GenRobotics in Kerala.

SEPoy takes inspiration from a robot named Bandicoot first introduced by Kerala’s GenRobotics in 2018. The Bandicoot was designed with a flexible arm that can collect the garbage and use a can to contain and lift it out of the sewer, and finally take out it.

The Bandicoot is known for analyzing the surrounding space and enabling a human operator to control it from the outside of the manhole.

As per the SEPoy robot, it owns a smaller appearance and therefore, the robot will be easier to move among all types of waste, from the upper layer with liquid garbage to the lower one of sludge that used to be cleaned by only human employees.

The SEPoy robot from IIT Madras students.

Instead of using a rotary propeller as in common robots, the IIT Madras students designed a bio-inspired propeller with six distinctive fins and many cutting tools. As such, the robot can easily push the sludge away to move through the waste and pump it out via a tanker. In addition, these cutting tools can adjust the robot’s size to match an opening manhole.

The student group is now discussing the collaboration with the Safai Karamchari Andolan or SKA. They also hope that a final robot will be released by the end of this year. The government of Telangana have reportedly been ready to leverage the robot if it can meet the demands in the trials.

However, they have to overcome a lot of difficulties to turn the current prototype into the real product, such as enhance the ability to be spark-proof, water-resistant, or move around, or communicate with human operators via wireless systems. As expected, the SEPoy robot will go on sale for about Rs 10-30 lakh.

Also, we should put more attention on improving robotic techniques to design automated devices with a lower price, which can replace human workers as sewage cleaners if saving more lives is what we aim at.