The Institute has established the following centres of Research and Development:

iSERC is a newly formed center for advanced industry-oriented research in software engineering. It is a consortium of Universities and Software organizations in India aimed at making India a world-class software research environment. BITS, Pilani is an active participant and is taking the lead in organizing this consortium. The activities of the consortium will be centered on advanced research in the field of software engineering focused on industry-specific needs. Specific research projects will be sponsored by industry members of the consortium and carried out by faculty and graduate students of university members of the consortium. Major players in the Indian software industry and a few top-notch Indian educational institutions are founding participants in this exciting new venture! 

For more details visit : iSERC Page

The objectives of the Centre for Materials Science and Technology are to develop and implement projects related to fibre-reinforced plastic composite materials as well as those related to other engineering materials such as metals, ceramics and polymers. The Centre also undertakes mechanical and non-destructive testing of various engineering materials for evaluating their mechanical properties and for evaluating defects such as cracks, voids, delamination, inclusions etc. Other activities include developing courses related to Materials Science and Technology and organizing Conferences/Seminars/Workshops/Short Courses in this area and to provide consultancy related to testing/development and analysis in the field of material science and technology.

The testing facilities available at the Centre include Universal Testing Machine, Hounsfield Tensometer, various hardness testing machines such as Brinell, Rockwell, and Vickers Hardness Testers, Rotating Bending Fatigue Testing Machine, Combined Bending and Torsion Fatigue Testing Machine, Circular Polariscope, Strain-gauge testing facility, Izod and Charpy Impact Testing Machines, X-Ray Diffractometer, Ultrasonic Flaw Detectors, Liquid Penetrant Test kit, Magnetic Crack Detector, Eddy Current Tester etc.

The Centre is also well equipped with computational facilities. Advanced software packages for Finite Element Analysis and for micro and macro analysis of composites materials (e.g. PROMAL) are available at the Centre.

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This centre was established with financial support from the University Grants Commission, New Delhi.

Objectives and scope of the Centre:

• To become a nerve centre of the Institute in terms of ideas, creativity and innovation.
  

• To promote research on educational management and administrative processes.
  
• To systematically document and integrate knowledge and skills generated at the workbench for all levels of education.
  
• To enable and motivate forces behind operation, expansion, strengthening, updating and modernization of teaching, research and consultancy in formal and informal education.
  
• To apply the experience obtained through implementation of educational innovation towards strengthening of manpower training.
  
• To pool interested manpower in the Institute as well as manpower from outside.
  
• To create facilities and environments for interested faculty from within as well as from outside universities and educational organizations to do research on educational innovations.
  
• To organize certain specific programs like practice school, vocational courses for other educational institutions who wish to implement such innovations.
  
• To organize special programs for the use of educators, planners, administrators and managers so as to enable the latest theory and practice in different disciplines and functional areas to reach all sections of manpower in government, education, business and industries.
  
• To organize seminars, symposia and workshops.
  
• To collect the data-base from UGC, AIU and various universities relevant for educational reforms and innovations.
  
• To create software to analyze all these data.

The areas in which the Centre concentrates are:

• Planning and implementation of examination reforms
  

• Design and restructuring of educational programs
  
• Course development - Preparation of text books, teaching materials,  teaching aids
  
• Computer software development for educational administration and infrastructural facilities
  
• Computer software development for student records, time-table, admission process
  
• Teaching workshops for upgrading teaching skills
  
• Purchase and upkeep of Educational Hardware
  
• The new methods of vocational training
  
• Development of Distance Learning Programs, particularly in Science & Technology areas
  
• University-Industry linkages
  
• Development of new methodology for educational and cultural advancement of the socially disadvantaged
  
• Adult education
  
• Science education
  Methodology of faculty development
  
• Systems approach to educational operation and correlation between cost of education and efficiency of education
  
• Preparation of feasibility project and status reports on specific topics
  
• Offering services in the acquisition of equipment, library books, journals and experts for new institutions in the country and abroad
  
• Evolving new norms for innovations in new universities in the developing countries
  
• Organization of Placement Unit - Campus Interviews, Career Planning
  
• Counseling of students

The Centre uses for its methodology organization of seminars, symposia, workshops, brainstorming sessions in specific areas. The Centre collates a large data-base already available at BITS and collects data from UGC, AIU, AICTE and various universities and develops systems and software for analyzing these data. The Centre has visiting faculty and research scholars. The Institute faculty picks up topics of research which are of interest to the activities of the Centre. In short it is a place where unique activities in terms of planning, implementation and reforms are taken up. The Centre accepts preparation of study reports and consultancy jobs in the above areas, as well as, plans to conduct certain training programs. The Centre also publishes a quarterly Journal, "CURIE" - Journal of Co-operation among University, Research and Industrial Enterprises.

The objectives of the centre are to (I) conceive, develop, and implement renewable energy application and environment protection projects, (ii) develop courses and organize awareness creation programs, (iii) collaborate with national and international organizations and institutions in the areas of renewable energy education, training and technology development. The Centre is presently collaborating with MNES, IREDA, REDA, ARTES Institute, of Flensburg University, Germany, and CEER of SPIC Science Foundation, Chennai. Centre is actively involved in setting up performance evaluation of parabolic solar cookers, solar hot water system, solar still and fuel cells and setting up of an Energy Park.

The objective of this Centre is to develop prototypes that provide greater intelligence and higher versatility for robotic tasks under ever-changing constraints of the environment. This objective is set forth to make Indian industry competitive by developing indigenous technical skills, manpower and innovative spirit. Each prototype is developed in four different stages: (i) conceptualization, (ii) algorithmic development and verification in simulated environment, (iii) real-time testing and (iv) integration to automated system. The CRIS is very well equipped and is aiming to explore the possibilities of creating virtual intelligence in animated systems. The new computing systems will be based upon the virtual cognitive machines for solving the real world perception, reasoning and decision making problems. The research group of CRIS has its members from Electrical & Electronics, Instrumentation, Mechanical and Computer Science. Besides faculty members, many students from various disciplines work on different projects at CRIS for their doctoral thesis, M.E. dissertations and first degree thesis.

The Centre for Robotics has collaborations with CAIR, Bangalore, BARC, Mumbai and University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, U.S.A. Current activities of this Centre are in areas such as mechanical design and fabrication of articulated SCARA and direct drive manipulators, autonomous guided vehicles for uneven terrains and walking robots; dynamic control of robot arm, adaptive and robust control, modeling and control using neural and fuzzy neural networks; real-time control using DSP and micro controller based controller card; path planning, development of infra-red and ultrasonic based obstacle avoidance module, fusion of vision with ultrasonic based sensing system, global and local path planning in both static and dynamic environment; robotic vision, visuo-motor coordination, visual tracking, active vision and object recognition; intelligent system design, machine learning, computation and virtual reality.

Embedded Controller Application Centre

This Centre has been set up in Collaboration with MOTOROLA INDIA LTD. The objectives of the Centre is to impart detailed understanding of important features of embedded controller architectures and familiarizing advanced concepts in the field of embedded controllers through

• Industrial projects/sponsored projects/student projects
• Research and development of applications around embedded controllers
• Imparting training to the industry professionals and running short term courses in the field of Applications design
• Developing course modules

The infrastructure of the centre includes Pentium machines, Micro controller Modular Evaluation Systems, Micro controller Development Systems, Emulators, Assemblers and Cross compilers for various micro controller families, DSP processors, logic analyzer and other bench equipments.

The Centre is also collaborating with ST MICROELECTRONICS in this area. The company has gifted two of their ST-7 emulators useful for embedded system design.

Technology Innovation Centre

The Technology Innovation Centre was conceived to be a complimentary activity to the Practice School, where problems of industry can be investigated on the campus through the involvement of professionals from industry, BITS students and faculty. This Centre provides for engineer/scientist of industry to spend a desired period of time at the campus. Investigations can be made on problems brought from industry by the engineer/scientist himself or those identified by a team consisting of the engineer, BITS students and faculty. A number of industries have responded very favorably to this concept and are actively participating. The students do these projects either for the “Thesis” course or for the course entitled "TIC Project". The investigations are being done at the campus under the direct supervision of engineers from industry who have access to all BITS facilities. The Technology Innovation Centre also received in past fund support from the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, for further strengthening of this activity.

Useful contributions have been made to the developmental needs of technology generation for the companies. Many products for which the technology is generated through this process are commercialized by the industries.

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Specialized Laboratories

Apart from the centres described above, the following specialized laboratories have been established with a view to strengthen research and development in the respective areas:

(i) Fiber Optics: Infrastructure includes PC based instrumentation for characterization of optical fibers for communication, opto- electronic sources and detectors; facilities for development of point and distributed fiber optic sensors fiber optic communication kits, apart from computational facilities.

(ii) Process Control: Infrastructure includes computer control of chemical engineering process such as distillation column, evaporator, heat exchangers and various types of reactors.

(iii) Flexible Manufacturing Systems: Infrastructure includes state of the art facilities for teaching, training research and development in the field of manufacturing systems, such as computer numerically controlled machining center and Robot for material handling, lathe and computational facilities.