EDU students build a humanoid robot

Due to various limitations, Bangladesh naturally lags a bit behind the developed world in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. But still, Bangladesh is working and trying to contribute. Recently, amidst the pandemic, five East Delta University (EDU) students have successfully built a robot. In a year's effort, the humanoid robot, named "ROBO EDU 2.0", was created by a team of five students studying in the Electrical and Electronics Engineering program.

A specialty of ROBO EDU is its mobility. It can move around and can carry out various commands such as giving a salute by listening to verbal instructions; it can recognise faces of people standing in front of it, for that the identity and the picture of that person need to be given or stored in the robot's database in advance. The robot then scans the face of the person standing in front and compares the face with the data stored in its memory.

Team leader Minul Islam said, "We started building ROBO EDU before the university was closed due to the coronavirus outbreak. Because of the closure, the overall work got delayed."

"Our robot is capable of performing certain tasks smoothly, including recognising faces using data analysis from stored information. Python has been used as its programming language. It can be controlled simultaneously via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The robot's technological and programming phase is over; we are currently working to make its exterior more humane."

The other members of the team are Naimul Alam, Jahedul Islam, Akramul Islam, Monirul Islam.

Lecturer Baque Billah, the supervisor of the team, said, alongside the final year project; another main objective behind ROBO EDU was to develop a reconfigurable robot that can be used as a learning tool for EDU Future Factory, where students will be able to learn about AI-robot and also to implement their AI related ideas to observe the real-field output for further analysis.

The present one is just for demo purposes, he added, "To fulfill our real purpose, we need to make more structural modifications and also have to install a high configuration CPU instead of the present one."

Congratulating the team, Sayeed Al Noman, Founder Vice-Chairman of EDU, said that the university has been paying special attention to technological developments and innovations, and encouraging students to participate in various competitions.

"For that, we have formed a Robotics Club, and we are sponsoring students. Besides, in EDU Future Factory, our faculty members and students practice new-fangled technologies like Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Internet of Things, Blockchain and Data Science."

He hopes that EDU students would make a significant contribution to the future technology-dependent world.