The students of MS Ramaiah Institute of Technology recently organised an exhibition that displayed projects made by final-year students. The projects belonged to software and hardware categories and a mix of both.
Some of the designs made by the students using the latest technology included cognitive learning, embedded systems, audio processing, smart defence systems, a GPS-based bus-tracking system and image processing. Other projects were based on real time like temperature monitoring of food grains, tracking of wildlife, surveillance systems etc.
Raghunandana R, who was a member of the team that designed a ‘Cognitive Learning Assisted Robotic Arm’ (CLARA), says, “This robotic arm is aimed at reaching places where human interventions face challenges, like in mines. This can also be used in day-to-day places of activity like in operation theatres.” He details that CLARA is a system that has lot of advantages. “Earlier, information had to be pre-programmed and stored for an action to happen, but with CLARA, it’s like how a baby learns. When you show CLARA an object, it identifies it and will ask you about what action needs to be processed on identifying the object later,” he elaborates.
Other projects were aimed at assisting the disabled. Srinivasa Murthy, who worked on the ‘Third Eye’ project, says that the project aims to help the blind. “We designed an Android application that captures text and converts it to speech. Other applications like these can be found in the market, but we have specifically designed it to be used by low-end phones which have just a two-megapixel camera,” elucidates Srinivasa. Another portable device that could capture texts and convert it to speech was also designed by the team.
Monitoring wildlife is a requisite of the day with an increasing number of endangered species and lot of illegal activities against animals. A team of four girls designed ‘Pattern Recognition For Wildlife’, which can address this issue. Ritika Muralidhara, one of the team members, says, “The process was tedious, but we tried to bring together a system that would identify an animal even in its surroundings. We took the tiger as an example, of which we had to collate about 1,000 images.” Ritika and her team hopes that this project will be able to address the issues of poaching and keep a close watch on animals that are targeted.
