Made in Bangladesh
Developed by Sust students, humanoid robot ‘Lee’ generates buzz
His name is Lee. Standing at around four feet tall, he can interact with people, walk, and communicate in Bangla. Did we mention -- he can even dance!
Lee the humanoid robot was developed by “Friday Lab”, a group of five students of Shahjalal University of Science and Technology (Sust), recently.
They officially introduced Lee at an event on Monday on the campus. Prior to that, a demo was shown before State Minister for ICT Zunaid Ahmed Palak and noted educationist Prof Muhammad Zafar Iqbal on April 20 during the university’s Tech Fest.
Friday Lab worked three years to develop the humanoid robot with the funding of ICT division, they said.
Noushad Sojib, former student of the department of Computer Science and Engineering at Sust and a lecturer at North East University Bangladesh, led the team. The other members are: Mehedy Hasan of Architecture department; Saiful Islam of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, and Samiul Hasan and Sultana Jyoti of Mechanical Engineering.
They said many students of the university also supported in their effort. On naming the humanoid robot, they said they named it after the extinct Bangla letter “Lee”.
Lee can stand and walk on two feet. He can also shake hands, gesture with his eyes and replicate dance moves. “With the help of its artificial intelligence, it can answer any question on the country and the Liberation War,” said Noushad.
The developers said Lee is being operated with Ubuntu operating system and programmed sing Java and Python coding languages. The humanoid robot contains eight gigabytes of Ram and is being processed with a Core i5 processor. Lee has three motor and three micro controllers along with an android phone inside.
“We believe robots will play an important role in future, especially for household and office work,” said Noushad. “We developed Lee to show that we can develop humanoid robots in our country too.”
In 2016, another team “ROBO SUST” developed a robot named “RIBO”, which was capable of speaking in Bangla and interacting with people.