STAFF REPORT IBD: The robotics sector has started gaining ground in Pakistan as over 60 engineering universities across the country are presently teaching robotics at the graduate and post-graduate levels. The research and development (RandD) institutes established at these universities are also undertaking innovative experimentations in robotics. “A technical group has been engaged to develop automation of industrial processes at the National Institute of Electronics (NIE) in Islamabad and Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), which are applied in automatic industrial controls,” said an official from the Ministry of Science and Technology. He said that the research group at the Centre for Intelligent Machines and Robotics (IMR) at the COMSATS Institute of Information Technology (CIIT) is working on research projects in robotics, computer vision and machine learning. These research projects are related to industrial and societal tasks with basic and applied research undertaken in robotics technologies.