Yesterday was such a hectic day for me!
In a single day, I had to evaluate 10x undergraduate final year projects during SMME Open House from 0900-1300hrs, 4x MS thesis final presentations from 1430-1630hrs, and 1x PhD In-House defense from 1700-1800hrs.
Yesterday was truly a Defense Day for me 😄
Anyway, the big event of the day was definitely SMME Open House. 39x final year projects were on display for demonstration and evaluation. This year, I supervised 2x final year projects (each faculty member is allowed only two).
The first project was called “Development of Mobile Robot for Warehouse Automation”. This project was inspired by Amazon warehouses where robots are used to pick objects from storage bins. Then these robots navigate autonomously in the warehouse and bring those objects to the desired destination.
The second project was titled "Autonomous Weeding Mobile Robot". This project is from the domain of Agricultural Robotics. In this project, my students developed a mobile robot that could autonomously navigate in a field, detect weeds in it, and kill the weeds using laser without damaging the crop being cultivated in the field. This project was declared the 3rd overall best project out of the 39 total projects on display. The team was awarded with a prize money of 60,000/- PKR (30,000/- each by both Bemsol Private Ltd. and Cowlar Inc.) Well done guys!!
I was really happy and pleased to see that despite belonging to a Mechanical Engineering degree program, the students showed a lot of interest in developing multidisciplinary projects and a significant number of robotics and AI projects were on display at the Open House. Well done SMME! More power to you!!