Papers by Nitin Ajithkumar
Journal of Sanatana Dharma, 2025
The existence of the Tāntric tradition, both mythically and historically, owes itself to the effo... more The existence of the Tāntric tradition, both mythically and historically, owes itself to the efforts of great beings and the paramparās that they set into motion. In traditional narratives of Tantra, these mythical figures are seen to be central in the contextualization and the continuity of the tradition itself. Among them, the Yuganātha stands apart due to his pre-eminence and his singular contribution in revitalizing the Tāntrika landscape, literally and figuratively, especially the Kaulabased Tāntric traditions. Several references are made in the Tāntrika scriptures to the Yuganātha, who appears in every Yuga to transmit the Kaulāgamā. In this sequence of legendary beings, Macchandanātha finds his place as the Yuganātha of Kali-yuga. The paper discusses the meaning and significance of the concept of Yuganātha, drawing references from various texts, both literal and implied. It is further established that Macchanda or Matsyendranātha is the Yuganātha of Kali, especially keeping in mind the reference to the same by Mahāmaheśvarāchārya Abhinavagupta in his magnum opus, Śrī Tantrāloka. A brief overview of his mythical origins and his contributions is also given in this paper to highlight the nature of the influence a Yuganātha has in establishing the Kaula tradition and deeply influencing other traditions.
Implementation of Gesture Control in Robotic Arm Using Kinect Module
Applied Mechanics and Materials, Aug 1, 2015
This research work is targeted at building and analyzing a robotic arm which mimics the motion of... more This research work is targeted at building and analyzing a robotic arm which mimics the motion of the human arm of the user. The propsed system monitors the motion of the user’s arm using a Kinect. Using the “Kinect Skeletal Image” project of Kinect SDK, a skeletal image of the arm is obtained which consists of 3 joints and links connecting them. 3-D Coordinate Geometry techniques are used to compute the angles obtained between the links. This corresponds to the angles made by the different segments of the human arm. In this work we present the capturing of human hand gestures by Kinect and analyzing it with suitable algorithms to identify the joints and angles. Also the arduino based microcontroller used for processing Kinect data is presented.
Kinect based gesture controlled Robotic arm: A research work at HuT Labs
2013 IEEE International Conference in MOOC, Innovation and Technology in Education (MITE), 2013
ABSTRACT Undergraduate (UG) Research is the first step in a students' life to taste the e... more ABSTRACT Undergraduate (UG) Research is the first step in a students' life to taste the experience of a research work. It is also a unique experience for the teachers to guide the students in research work during their UG study. In this paper we want to share our research experience through the project that involves the building of a Robotic arm which mimics the motion of the human arm of the user at Humanitarian Technology (HuT) Labs of Amrita. The system monitors the motion of the user's arm using a Kinect. The skeletal image of the arm obtained using the “Kinect Skeletal Image” project of Kinect SDK, consists of 3 joints and links connecting them. Coordinate Geometry is used to calculate the angles between the links connecting the joints. This gives us the angles for a 3D representation of the human arm. The angles thus obtained are sent using a serial communication port to the Arduino microcontroller, which in turn generates signals which are sent to the servo motors. The servo motors rotate according the angles given as input. The combined motion of the servos results in a complete Robotic arm movement which is a mimic of the human arm movement.
An Advanced Spider-Like Rocker-Bogie Suspension System for Mars Exploration Rovers
This paper describes the working of the system design for the Mars rover. The rover, developed to... more This paper describes the working of the system design for the Mars rover. The rover, developed to compete in the Mars Society’s University Rover Challenge 2015, was designed to perform various tasks such as site survey, sample return, equipment servicing, and astronaut assistance in a Mars-like landscape of dry, non-vegetated, rocky terrain. The complete design features a bioinspired eight-wheeled drive mechanism, an integrated robotic arm along with a stereo vision technique for advanced image processing. This paper focuses on the drive mechanism of the rover design. The 8-wheeled rover combines the rocker-bogie mechanism with four rocker wheels and four spider-leg wheels. The spider legs ensure that it can traverse over heights greater than the chassis height, which could be three times as much as the diameter of the wheels. NASA’s current rover can only traverse a height twice the diameter of the wheel. Additionally, the wheels are actuator-powered, and hence, the slope of the ro...
Identification of an effective learning approach to landmine detection
The Robot based landmine detection problem is a multiphase problem in which one element is the cl... more The Robot based landmine detection problem is a multiphase problem in which one element is the classification of landmines and clutter. To design an efficient and effective classification model requires considering factors such as the failure to detect a landmine, detection time and the high amount of false alarms that occur due of improper classification. In the absence of an extensive analysis on the effectiveness of such models, this project aims to analyze 5 different classifiers namely: Hidden Markov Model, Support Vector Machine, Artificial Neural Network, Gradient Boosted Decision Tree and Adaptive Boosted Decision trees. Two GPR based datasets have been used both of which are open source and contain data for foliage and dry, desert type soils respectively. To make the study comprehensive in terms of class label proportion as well, various ratios of mine to non-mine data is considered. The comparison of the models has been done using confusion matrices with its associated mea...
Engineering the Perception of Recognition Through Interactive Raw Primal Sketch by HNFGS and CNN-MRF
Proceedings of 2nd International Conference on Computer Vision & Image Processing
The impression of a scene on human brain, specifically the primary visual cortex, is still a far-... more The impression of a scene on human brain, specifically the primary visual cortex, is still a far-reached goal by the computer vision research community. This work is a proposal of a novel system to engineer the human perception of recognizing a subject of interest. This end-to-end solution implements all the stages from entropy-based unbiased cognitive interview to the final reconstruction of human perception in terms of machine sketch in the framework of forensic sketch of suspects. The lower mid-level vision as designed behaviorally in primary visual cortex honoring the scale-space concept of object identification has been modeled by hierarchical 2D filters, namely hierarchical neuro-visually inspired figure-ground segregation (HNFGS) for interactive sketch rendering. The aforementioned human–machine interaction is twofold: in gross structural design layer and finer/granular modification of the pre-realized digital perception. Pre-realized sketches are formed learning the characteristics of human artists while sketching an object through integrated framework of deep convolutional neural network (D-CNN) and Markov Random field (MRF). After few iterations of interactive fine-tuning of the sketch, a psycho-visual experiment has been designed and performed to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
An Intelligent Rover Design Integrated with Humanoid Robot for Alien Planet Exploration
Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, 2015
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Papers by Nitin Ajithkumar