BENGALURU: Wipro and the Indian Institute of Science IISc ) are jointly working on a driverless car project and building the country’s first home-grown metal 3D printing machine, said Azim Premji , founder-chairman of Wipro.Last month, both organisations set up the Wipro IISc Research and Innovation Network , a hybrid industry academia collaboration unit, which will drive the discovery of ideas, research and innovation in technology and product design. It includes projects to carry out advanced applied research in autonomous systems, robotics and 5G telecom. “... We have continued to recruit from your institution and do collaborative projects at the cutting edge of technology; for example, we are together doing a project on driverless cars and building India’s first indigenous metal 3D printing (additive manufacturing) machine,” said Premji at the IISc Convocation 2019. Premji praised the IISc for its role in the company’s diversification into the IT business back in 1979.The 74-year-old IT mogul said, when Wipro approached the newly set-up Centre for Scientific and Industry Consultancy at IISc back then, the institute formed a committee to advise the company.“The institute constituted a committee to advise us on what computer we should make. This consulting project involved surveying literature on the computers being made all over the world. And, it was also a platform for technical discussions, conceptualization and design review between Wipro’s R&D team and IISc. It was here that we began to think about what chips, bus and microprocessor should be used in the first Wipro computer,” said Premji.