Soon, robot cops for real in India

Robots may soon crack the face behind a crime with software experts working on a technology that would enable the locomotive machines draw fool-proof features of suspects based on information given by the victims.

The technology involves equipping robots with 'capabilities of social interaction that would enable them to behave intelligently and coherently with humans, enabling them to perform their function as criminal face developers', Indian Institute of Information Technology-Allahabad (IIIT-A) Director M D Tewari told PTI.

He said IIIT-A has been working on Effective Human Robot Interaction Technology, which, he claims, enables robots mimic human beings' interaction with each other for quite some time. The researchers are of the view that it would enable robots being acceptable for wider application areas like identification of criminals and terrorists.

"An application of the technology would enable the robot to learn to evolve a design and draw the face of a criminal through analysis and synthesis based on the feedback received from the victim of a terrorist attack or any other type of crime," Tiwari said.

"The robot would maintain the faces of all criminals in an area in its database  both in full form and fragmented forms of components of faces like ears, nose, eyes, lips, eyebrow, forehead separately," he added.

In the absence of such technology, sketches are now drawn manually based on the vague descriptions given by the victims as a result of which release of sketches for getting hold of criminals/terrorists quite often becomes futile.

Such a problem was recently encountered in the aftermath of the Jaipur serial bomb blasts as confusing inputs from witnesses and victims led to the probe agencies releasing sketches only to withdraw them later and replace the same with new ones, hindering the investigation process.

"The proposed technology would help solve this problem perfectly and could find application in all police stations, detective, investigative departments," Tiwari said, adding that IIIT-A's Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory was working on giving final touches to the project.