December | 2019
Chandrayaan 2, India’s lunar exploration mission, has captured our minds and hearts in the last few months. The mission was ambitious as India is only the fourth country in the world to attempt a soft landing on the moon. Russia, USA and China are the three other countries that have been successful in this mission before. Chandrayaan 2 was also the first mission in the world to attempt a landing on the south pole of the moon. A billion people waited with patience, anticipation and anxiety well past mid night for this historic event to unfold. There were moments of joy as the moon lander Vikram successfully separated from Chandrayaan 2 orbiter and started its descent in ‘autonomous mode’ to the surface of the moon. Unfortunately, the mission was not entirely successful as we lost communication with Vikram when it was 2.1 Km above the moon’s surface. The nation was disappointed but united in its support for the brilliant scientists of ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization) who selflessly and tirelessly worked for the last few years on this ambitious project.
As the events of the last few days unfolded, I could not help but draw parallels with the making of WiPOD, Wipro’s reference platform for an autonomous campus car. Many of you would have seen WiPOD in action in our Electronic City campus. Both WiPOD and Vikram are complex closed loop autonomous systems that operate in real-time to deal with the dynamic surrounding environment. There are important lessons that we can learn from both on what it takes to build these autonomous systems.
Before I proceed further, let me first clarify that Vikram has a much higher order of complexity compared to WiPOD and some of them are listed below:-
It will take several weeks if not months for ISRO scientists to analyze the telemetry data and images of Vikram from Chandrayaan 2, and determine the root cause of what went wrong in the ‘last mile’. It would be unfair to hazard a guess on the cause of failure. Hence, I am sharing with you the multiple lessons that we learnt during our 18-month journey of building WiPOD with the sole objective of what it takes to engineer autonomous systems. Following are some of the key lessons learnt:
Autonomous systems is an active area of research for me during my spare time and so if any of you are interested, please reach out to me to share your thoughts, insights and innovative ideas. I would love to hear back from you and have a deeper discussion on this fascinating topic.
Jayanta Dey
Vice President and Business Head, NEPC Vertical – Tech BU
Jayanta is responsible for CTO initiatives for the Technology Business Unit on emerging themes like 5G, AI and Cloud Native. He has over 30 years' experience in the Telecommunication industry. He holds a BE (Hons) Electronics Engineering from BITS Pilani and an MBA from Northeastern University, Boston. He can be reached at jayanta.dey@wipro.com
© 2021 Wipro Limited |
|
© 2021 Wipro Limited |
Digital Operations and Platforms
Engineering, Construction & Operations
Pharmaceutical & Life Sciences