Students take keen interest in robotics at science festival

Robotics has come up as a key area of interest among students of various districts who participated in the West Bengal State Students Youth Science Festival.

In the science festival, students prepared science models based on the technology of robotics. The students demonstrated how the robots perform various activities which include dousing off flames to household work like cleaning of floors and placing one article from one placing to another.

While a student of electrical diploma from Purulia gave a final shape to a robot using infrared sensor, two Class XI students from a small

hamlet in Hooghly used simple bamboo sticks and syringes to construct their hydraulic robot that was found capable of firing a bullet for its self defence.

The robots were displayed in the festival at Netaji Indoor Stadium for the past three days and the best of all the science models were awarded by the state Youth Services and Sports department.

Mahadeb Mondal, a third year student of electrical diploma in Purulia Polytechnic College, was found explaining many other students that how "Fobo" – the fire fighter robot – functions. He said: "The robot can automatically scan if there is any fire within 10 metre of its position. It can rotate 180 degrees. The infrared sensor helps Fobo to identify that at which direction it should proceed to put out a flame."

Fobo can perform at a speed of 16 MHz to identify and spray water to extinguish flames. After executing mathematical and logical operations, Fobo takes only 60 seconds to identify and extinguish flames at a distance of around 10 feet. Interestingly, water is sprayed at a flame using a micro submersible pump fitted to the rear part of the robot.

Again, Diprojit Mondal and Aritra Samaddar — the two Class XI students of Pandua SBS High School — reached to the state level of the competition on scientific models in the West Bengal State Students Youth Science Festival after toiling a lot for the past four months.

It is not easy to understand just at a glance that the robot is made up of simple bamboo sticks and it is being operated using hydraulic pressure.

The robot can easily move around and was found picking up different materials. Moreover, a toy gun was also found fitted to it to demonstrate that it can also fire, using the same technique of hydraulic pressure, for self defence.