A team of researchers led by Amol Deshmukh, a scientist in Scotland originally from India, has designed and developed a water-hauling robot to help residents of remote villages in India.

The robot also will help residents in select areas of Scotland, according to an IDTechEx report.

The research project aims to help reduce labor involved with carrying water from a central well to residents’ homes, the report said.

More than half of India’s population has no access to tap water in their homes. So people spend a great deal of time and energy every day carrying water from wells, the researchers said, according to the report.

To provide a solution the research team used a four-wheeled device from Clearpath Robotics – known as Husky – to help people carry water to their homes from a local well, it said.

“Most research on human-robot interactions is conducted in laboratory environments in urban settings,” Deshmukh, a research associate at the University of Glasgow, said in the report. “There people have some concept of what robots are and how they work because they’ve seen them on television and in film.”

The robot, according to the report, could carry three 20-liter bottles at a time. It also communicated using a synthetic voice. The robot’s motion and speech were controlled by the researchers via remote control, it added.

Those researchers discovered that less labor was required of the residents when using the robot. They also observed how people who had never seen a robot would interact with it, the report noted.

Understanding challenges of introducing robotic solutions in remote settings is an important step toward informing design decisions for robotic products, said Akshay Nagarajan, an assistant professor of robotics at Amrita University, in the report.

The researchers said they wanted to observe how people from more remote rural populations would view robots, it added.

“Robot helpers are ideally placed to help populations reach the United Nations’ sustainable-development goals of bridging the digital divide and opening up beneficial technology to people around the world,” Deshmukh added in the report.

The robot in the research study communicated with volunteers to encourage them to place water jugs on top of it and to show it the way to their homes.

Once the volunteers decanted the water into storage containers at their homes, the robot thanked them. After several days of using the robot, the researchers asked each of the volunteers about it, IDTechEx said.

“Every one of them said the robot made their lives easier. They unanimously reported that they enjoyed working with the robot,” Deshmukh continued. “It’s clear that labor-saving devices like these bring real benefits to remote communities. We’re keen to do more work with our partners in India to explore these issues.”

The research was funded by the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance and Amrita University of Kerala, India.