by Cindy X. S. Zheng
What kind of robotic innovations are contributing to reaching the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)?
At AI for Good Impact India, the inaugural regional event dedicated to fostering diversity and inclusivity within the AI for Good landscape, three cutting-edge AI-powered solutions were showcased to inspire the audience to harness AI’s positive and diverse potential.
Lifesaving search bot COBRA
In an increasingly urbanized world, safety measures and oversight are taking a backseat to rapid construction. This is supercharged with environmental concerns. Earthquakes, in particular, cause the collapse of almost 2,100 buildings in India annually during the monsoon season.
“The problem is there are not enough people to do rescue work. The golden hour, which is the first one hour, is very crucial to save lives. That’s where automation is needed.” Ranit Chatterjee, Co-founder & CEO of RIKA India
Currently, emergency response teams use minimal automation in their labour-intensive work. Challenges include weather conditions, precision demands, especially for collapsed high-rise buildings that are the norm in urban centres, and the required dynamic for transportation and deployment. Small cities and low-to-middle-income countries are further disadvantaged due to a lack of resources, they cannot afford many robotics solutions on the market.

RIKA aims to change that with COBRA: The Collapse Building Search Assistive Robot is a snake robot that saves lives. Equipped with a dynamic vision that makes it possible to navigate through the rubble of collapsed buildings, the AI-supported mobility can manoeuvre through tough terrain and therefore replace rescue operators on the ground.
The robot has a camera head with a fisheye lens and a thermal sensor on top through which it can detect whether the found person is still alive, which is crucial for prioritization during rescue operations. COBRA’s movements mimic a snake with three-dimensional motions that can change its shape to adapt to its environment. These functions show how COBRA could also be deployed for other use cases, such as pipeline surveillance in the oil and gas sector, as well as for mining and building surveys.
More than its technical innovations, COBRA is a cost-effective solution, being offered far below the market average of rescue robots. Ranit Chatterjee highlights that COBRA is an Indian product that through its affordability and adaptability aims to leave no one behind.
Advancing accessibility with bionic innovation: KalArm, the hand of the future
We live in a world that has about 57.7 million amputees. 90 % of them cannot afford any of the available advanced prosthetics which cost anything between $4,000 to as high as $60,000.
That motivated Makers Hive CEO Pranav Vempati to build the world’s most affordable bionic hand: KalArm. The name is inspired by former President of India Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam. ‘Kal’ means ‘tomorrow’ in Hindi, therefore KalArm can be translated to ‘the hand of the future’.
A bionic hand’s value for an amputee can be life-changing: For the demonstration of KalArm, Pranav Vempati invited Vamshi who lost his hand when he was about 15 years old. After he receiving his KalArm, he was able to move into the city and make a living, riding a bike to the office every day.
“I wanted to build a product that can help people live with dignity.” Ranit Pranav Vempati, Co-founder & CEO of RIKA

Vamshi shakes hands with an audience member, opens a bottle, and writes on paper to showcase how the bionic hand works. Before every movement, EMG signals of the desired action are received through the user’s muscles which the bionic hand can detect. Compared to the legs, the motion of the hands is more complex and requires more sensitivity and dexterity. With advanced algorithms, KalArm can understand desired movements without any pressure or visual feedback.
KalArm is a new benchmark in assistive technology. Its 18 pre-defined grips, 6 customizable grips, and strength to lift to 20 kg offer a drastic rise in life quality for amputees. As India’s first bionic hand, Pranav Vempati illustrated the transformative power of technology for social impact and reducing inequalities by targeting under-resourced communities, making cutting-edge prosthetics accessible to all.
Exploring the solar system with AI-powered autonomous robotic vehicles at NASA
It is one of humanity’s biggest questions: Is there life beyond Earth?
Space scientists have been contemplating this for a long time, especially life on Mars which is one of the closest planets to Earth. Many missions to Mars have been robotic explorations; This session’s speaker has worked on almost all of them.
Vandi Verma is the Deputy Manager for Mobility and Robotics Systems at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA JPL) and an AI for Good veteran: She already spoke at the AI for Good Global Summit 2024 and at the AI for Good Discovery webinar as the expert on robots for sustainable space exploration.
Robots are sent to space for many reasons. In the latest mission, the Perseverance rover was tasked to bring samples from Mars back to Earth which has never been accomplished before. The specific target was the Jezero crater which harbours an ancient river delta, in which the chance of finding life is very high. The decades-long project was successful with 28 samples collected at the point of the presentation.

The autonomous vehicle has the potential of sudden failure as it is self-driving 90 percent of the time, having broken several records for the longest drive in a single Martian day, a sol, and without human intervention. To ensure that the samples are preserved in case of any technical errors, the rover deposited several samples on the surface of Mars.
There are many advantages of deploying autonomous robots in space. Mars is hundreds of millions of miles away, which means sending a one-way signal to Earth can have up to 24 minutes delay. Using autonomous solutions speeds up missions since communication needs are reduced to a minimum.
Moreover, deploying a robot for exploration that is equipped with wide-angle AI-powered lenses ensures that it can navigate and detect possible signs of life in a completely unfamiliar environment for both humans and robots. Potential interesting areas are investigated with a laser that creates a plasma and studies it with a telescopic imager.

Autonomous driving from Perseverance has far surpassed the distance in autonomous navigation compared to all other robots on Mars. Even though they are similar in size, significant improvements in computing, wheel sturdiness and other design capabilities have strengthened Perseverance’s performance.
However, there are also new challenges. One problem with reaching farther distances is that space rovers can lose track of their position since there is no GPS on Mars. To ensure more accurate localization capabilities, the space engineers capitalized on the commercial processor from the accompanying helicopter to match the images for localizing the rover on the ground manually from Earth, which could take more than one sol. With additional computing, the processing of images can take place onboard and thus be reduced to just half an hour. When comparing the automated with the human-assisted localization, the results showed 100 % accuracy for automation.
“With these autonomous capabilities and imaging techniques, the results are so compelling that we are actually in the process of putting this on the Rover on Mars so that we can drive kilometres without humans in the loop.” Vandi Verma, Deputy Manager for Mobility and Robotics Systems at NASA JPL
Further ambitions for their rovers are to increase their endurance for longer distances, make smaller robots so more missions can be undertaken, and access extreme terrain where signs of life might be found, with inventions like a snake robot that is being conceptualized. NASA’s recent Robotics Technology report outlines these efforts which follow the greater goal of exploration for the benefit of humanity.
AI for Good Impact India took place as a side event of the World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly (WTSA-24) on October 18. The inspiring hands-on demonstrations of existing robotic solutions spotlighted the power of AI to accelerate the UN SDGs, if in disaster response, rehabilitation engineering, or planetary missions.