LSU’s robot

In 1985, S.S. Iyengar returned to Baton Rouge with funding from the prestigious Oakridge National Laboratories to work on a robot. The robot now sits in a corner of the Robotics Research Lab in LSU’s Coates Hall with caps over its camera lenses. It’s close to six feet tall and has one function: surveillance.

Nowadays, Iyengar (above) and his graduate students—Bharat Narahari, Jong Hoon Kim and Suman Kumar—are focusing on other projects, such as the multi-functional AgBot. It looks like a simple remote-controlled cart, but this is just the first phase.

“Let’s assume you have 200 acres of land—you don’t need a farmer,” Iyengar says. “If you program the robot appropriately, it can cover the entire region. When it’s not doing agricultural functions, it can protect the terrain and act as a security system as well.”

While Iyengar’s one-dimensional, Oakridge-inspired robot cost half a million bucks, robot cost just $5,000, and its applications are hardly limited to the farm.

“In the future, you can just go to Best Buy and you say to yourself, ‘Today, I need to clean my toilet,” Narahari says. “Well, you get a toilet-cleaning module for the robot, install it, and it’s done.”