“Never stop thinking, improving and innovating”, a quote by Shu Uemura has found another apparent heir in Nehul. Nehul Patel, who hails from Madhya Pradesh and is a student of B.tech Electronics and Communication Engineering at Lovely Professional University, has achieved a new milestone by making a humanoid robot. Nehul Patel recently developed a low-cost humanoid serving robot which can be used as per the discretion of the owner. The robot is made up of acrylic sheet and PVC pipes and has a weight of about 12 kg. It has a run time of 2 hours on battery backup and costs around 16 thousand INR.
Nehul developed this robot during his internship at Edo Square. “This is my first Artificial Intelligence (AI) robot. During my internship, my mentor Muddit sir proposed the idea to build a humanoid. So we started working on it. Muddit Thakkar and Imran Baig helped me a lot during the process. Our aim was to create an efficient humanoid robot at a very low cost as this had never been done by anyone earlier. So I started working on this keeping in mind the Indian scenario, so as to provide better features at a lesser cost”.
The robot comes with an inbuilt Amazon Alexa SDK so as to give it a smarter approach. The robot can be used in the form of a home assistant, with controls that are both manual and voice command operated. The robot is based on IoT or Internet of Things by which it can perform various functions like home automation, interacting with people, etc. The robot can move to different places based on voice commands through infrared, which not only makes it more effective but also cheaper. It can be controlled from anywhere across the world as it is connected to various sensors and its hardware has been designed in such a manner that it stays interconnected through internet by using different IOT platforms that share their data to each other. The robot possesses seven microphones and a collision detector for safety.
As they say, ‘Success doesn’t come easy’, it was the same for Nehul and his team of innovators. “Connecting everything with IoT was a difficult task. We had to calibrate the code and connect all the sensors with Alexa as well as ensure that there was no delay in sending and receiving the protocols. It was a long and tiresome process because we needed to ready each code and then test it as they were to be interlinked. At some point in time, I also started losing confidence and had doubts in my mind. But we never gave up. Imran sir helped me build the mechanical body, while I gave it life through Alexa. When it finally became operational, it was the best moment for all of us”.
Nehul Patel who had previously developed an innovative device which could perform the functions of a CNC machine as well as a 3D printer goes on to show that if you have the will inside you, you can work wonders with the resources you possess. The path on which Nehul has decided to walk on will help build this nation as better a place. Lovely Professional University is proud to have students like Nehul and wishes the best to him for his future endeavors.
