Ramaprasanna Chellamuthu's home is overrun by robots, not the uncanny humanoid variety, but little convenience machines, each custom-made to serve a purpose — be it to wake him with a splash of water on his face if he doesn't respond to the morning alarm, to clean the house, or to alert him about intruders and overcooked noodles on the stove.
A "Developer Evangelist" for Microsoft, he has been designing the robots over weekends for five-six years, and in the past few months, has connected them to a cloud and to Internet for an integrated "buddyHome", a proof-of-concept system that uses already available face- and image-recognition technology to offer intelligent everyday solutions. All of it cost just a few hundred rupees.
Chellamuthu says buddyHome is a self-learning system that takes three pictures of him every second, processes them to understand whether he's sleeping or smiling and activates certain features accordingly, recollecting all the information from the cloud — based on Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud platform — at night to perform better with each day.
Besides security and entertainment features, one of the buddyHome modules enhances his magazine-reading experience by ascertaining his interest in a particular story or picture from his facial expression and pulling out videos on the subject to play on a projected screen. In a video he presented at Microsoft Tech-Ed India 2010, when he reads an IPL advert in a magazine, it offers to book tickets for the next game.
Now Chellamuthu is working on a hand-gesture-recognition system for the speech-impaired that will translate sign language into words.
Chellamuthu is also working on integrating into the system an autobot that can communicate real-time. "If I'm not on my seat and my boss sends me an instant message, won't it be cool if it can take my place and reply to him?" he says.
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