India is currently implementing Smart Cities 1.0. While the current focus is on automating pure IT-related tasks, there will be a need to automate physical tasks as well, that are mundane/dangerous - like surveillance, sorting of garbage, sewer cleaning etc. using robots. We believe the key challenge for this to successfully happen is related to programming and control of robots to work in unstructured environments. We will describe our initial attempts at using learning-based approaches to solve such problems.

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