Two students of Rajshahi University of Engineering and Technology (Ruet) have built a robot which is responsive to sound.
Saddam
Hossain and Abul Munjer, fourth year students of Electrical and
Electronics Engineering of Ruet built the robot with the help of Robotic
society of Ruet.
They said their robot has the capability to make movements sensing and analysing sounds.
The goal of this project is to develop a multimedia interactive autonomous mobile robot.
The duo is working to incorporate internet and other stuff to make it more interactive.
The
robot is able to localise and track sound sources in any complex
environment and has the abilities of separating target sound from
environment noise, the duo told The Daily Star.
However, the robot is inactive when there is no sound.
Made
on a wooden platform, at the moment, when the robot captures a sound it
moves its head to the direction of the sound and records the source of
the sound with its webcam.
The robot understands its environment
by sounds such as, human voice, footsteps, siren or crash and it can
avoid the obstacles and move towards its destination autonomously, they
said.
When there is pitch-black darkness, the sense of sound is
the only way to move. With its sound sensing ability, the robot can
change its movement which is the main characteristic of the robot, they
said.
“The purpose of this project is also to develop a
multipurpose robot which can be used in several ways. For example, the
robot can serve as a guard robot or can be used as an agent robot which
can attend a meeting instead of its owner. The owner through the robot
can get the visual of the meeting room with audio from a remote place,”
Munjer said.
“Considering a guard robot patrolling a specific
area, it should be able to work in two different modes. One is the
autonomous mode where the robot will automatically move and check for
possible suspicious objects. The other one is the remote control mode
where when the robot receives sound, it will be controlled by its owner
who will instruct it to approach and check for more details about the
object”, Hossain said.
He further told that the recent research on
this robot was almost concentrated on the autonomous aspect. “In this
project, we provided the robot with an interactive mode as well as the
autonomous mode,” he said.
The robot can also be used in security
system for convalesce act and in different industries. The robot has a
sound filtering system by which it can distinguish among the sounds.
It
can cover 360 degree to detect sounds with its 4 sound sensors.
However, there are few things that need to be improved, they said.
In Bangladesh, the robot is first of its kind, they claimed and it took them one and a half year to complete it.
They
also said that although this robot is first of its kind in Bangladesh,
the first world countries of the world are on it for a decade. In 1994,
American researcher for the first time started to work on this kind of
robot having sound sense.
Earlier on September 16, the Robot was exhibited on Ruet campus.
