What’s state of the art in engineering education is changing. So is the traditional role of an engineer as just a cog in the machine.

At the robotics centre strewn with mobile, quadruped, and armless robots, one contraption lies submerged in a water tank. On a mounted screen, a video shows how the machine works when fully wired up. Since its return from the Singapore Autonomous Underwater Vehicle ChallengeA prominent international student robotics competition that focuses on autonomous underwater vehicles, the bot is under student investigation.

As one of the smallest among the 45 qualifying teams globally, Sandeep Manjanna’s students at Plaksha University did not make it to the finals but seem happy to have come this far. After all, the university’s first batch of Btechs graduated in August.

An audacious, five-year-old experiment in Mohali, Punjab, to reimagine higher education in India, Plaksha has no departments. Its undergraduate programme has four majors, one of them being robotics and autonomous systems, which, incidentally, isn’t a standalone major in most premier engineering colleges in the country.

“We are going to build the most ambitious space robotics programme at Plaksha,” said Rudra Pratap (RP for everyone on and off campus).

The founding vice-chancellor was fresh off a meeting at the Indian space agency in Bengaluru. His claim is bold but not surprising. In the over 20 years that he spent at IISc, his own lab as well as the Centre for Nano Science and Engineering (Cense) that he built, have contributed to several technologies, including gallium nitride semiconductorGaN semiconductor is emerging as the material of choice for electronics as it is better suited for high power and high-frequency applications and neuromorphic computingNatureLinear symmetric self-selecting 14-bit kinetic molecular memristors.

Yet, Plaksha’s space robotics programme could well be India’s SputnikThe first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, Sputnik was launched by the Soviet Union in 1957 and triggered a 'space race' with the United States moment in this field. There’s a growing consensus that robotics’ ChatGPT momentWall Street JournalNvidia CEO Pitches Robotics, Cars as Growth Areas to Consumer-Electronics Audience is around the corner.