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.
-With The Daily Star input
