Nokia to set up robotics lab at Indian Institute of Science

Nokia will set up a robotics lab at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru to research socially-relevant use cases based on 5G and emerging technologies, the company said on Tuesday.

Nokia Centre of Excellence (CoE) for networked robotics will promote interdisciplinary research involving robotics, advanced communication technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) to develop socially relevant use cases in areas like emergency management, agriculture, and industrial automation, a statement said.

"Nokia has announced a collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), the country's leading institute and university for research and higher education in science and engineering, to establish the Nokia Centre of Excellence (CoE) for networked robotics," it added.

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The centre will promote engagement and cooperation between academia, startups and industry ecosystem partners in research and development of various use cases.

Some of the use cases that the collaboration will explore are using drones for remote management of agricultural orchards to promote water conservation and avoid human contact with pesticide, and drones using a 5G-enabled wide-area network to gather situational information, helping first responders to save lives by accessing the affected areas during disaster relief.

"The Nokia CoE, a state-of-the-art network robotics laboratory, will be available to the IISc community and its ecosystem partners for advanced research projects involving designing next-generation networks and applications of Artificial Intelligence for solving pertinent social problems," it said.

Nokia will share its expertise in network innovations and leverage Nokia Bell Labs' technical expertise in robot orchestration, robot network controller and human-robot interaction to help the research and development of the end-to-end use case technology solutions.

IISc will engage its cross-disciplinary faculty and researchers, and provide its in-house expertise in algorithms, drones and robotic systems.

Nokia has reported better than expected second-quarter earnings on the back of improved margins for telecoms equipment and software despite the coronavirus crisis causing a substantial drop in revenue.

CEO Rajeev Suri said in a statement that the majority of the drop in revenue was "the result of COVID-19 as well as a sharp decline in China based on the prudent approach we have taken in that market.

Nokia estimated that the COVID-19 crisis hurt its net sales by about €300 million in the second quarter and about €500 million in the first half of the year.

We expect that the majority of sales missed in the (second) quarter due to COVID-19 will shift to future periods, Suri said.

Suri said that Nokia has now concluded 83 commercial deals for 5G, the new network technology that allows ultra-fast downloading speeds among other things. Along with China's Huawei and Sweden's Ericsson, Nokia is one of the three main providers of 5G networks.