The University of Malta is celebrating one of its top engineering graduates who took his final year project and turned it into a business venture - www.eeroots.com. With a little encouragement from the Faculty of Engineering and the University's TAKEOFF Business Incubator, Reuben Ferrante made it his mission to turn his micro-robot final year project into an elegant educational tool for school children, and a very competitive, feature-rich and modular building-block for engineers, makers and researchers in less than a year!
While acknowledging that entrepreneurship is the way to go, Reuben designed a platform that integrates the maker's favourite sensors, tools and controllers... all without any wires or connections. The Integrated Development Platform comprises Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi, Infrared Sensors, Motor Control, Light Sensors, Colour Sensor, Compass, Gyro, Accelerometer, SD Card slot and USB on one platform the size of a fist.
Almost single-handedly Reuben worked out everything, from design, mass-manufacturing, logistics, company image, and a slick crowd funding campaign, which went live recently on www.zaar.com.mt and www.indiegogo.com and has already secured several orders.
Reuben was very careful to keep various users in mind. He intends to promote this initiative with secondary schools, sixth-forms and foreign academia, as he thinks each physics class and each engineering technology class should use this device. It is a very handy tool to have in order to learn and to create products with ease, but can also be used for playing games. Students could typically use it for debugging and learning embedded programming as well as prototyping for a final project that would include such sensors.
Reuben's eeMods could also be used for engineering research. For example - transforming the module into a robot and having a group of robots communicate together to perform a task cohesively - a research area known as swarm robotics. It has applications varying from autonomous surveillance to transportation. Swarm robotics research can demonstrate swarm intelligence behaviour in a physical environment, such as to show some interesting traffic-management patterns without having to build such devices from scratch every time.
His robots can network wirelessly and truly come to life when they operate in numbers. Yet market alternatives with a comparable feature-set cost several times over, making them impractical.
These robots are therefore being made available at a price that is accessible to students and schools and may be pre-ordered through the crowd funding web page at https://igg.me/at/eemod
Also see: www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWAll_nw-7o