Five students design bot to help doctors in ICU

Thane: In a bid to cut down human interference at intensive care unit (ICU) in hospitals, five students from VPM’s Polytechnic College have designed a robot that will help the medical team. The project, ICU service bot, has been designed by a group of five student Sumukh Sule(18), Ankit Waradkar(20), Pranay Sondkar(19), Sandeep Deshpande(18) and Dilip Gupta(18).
The dawned upon the students of industrial electronics when they were watching the Hollywood movie Interstellar. “The movie has a robot named TARS who is a crew member of the other astronauts. Due to him around there is no need for any other being as he would help them in everything they needed, including some advice. The concept of ‘no human interference’ struck us by seeing him,” said Sule.
The five who were given a task by the college to come up with a unique project. They then put their minds together and worked around building a robot that could help doctors in intensive care units as the number of people inside the room is limited. “We thought if not a real TARS, at least we could make a basic bot that can help doctors in wards where human interaction is less,” said Waradkar.
The team took time out from their hectic schedules between college and assignments and came up with a bot that looks like a box put on wheels.
“It took us nearly five months to complete the robot as we could work only on weekends. Also, all of us live in different cities. So, we couldn’t stay up late and work. We often made small trips to Lamington Road in Mumbai to purchase parts for our bot. The trip to Mumbai city was like a picnic for us,’’ said Gupta.
The functioning of the bot is not on remote control. “Through programming, a path can be designed for the bot. So, one puts on the switch, the bot goes to its assigned spot. From there, one can send to bot back to its original location,” said Deshpande, while describing the fuctioning of the robot.
The bot runs on a detachable 12-volt battery which can be easily charged with an adaptor. One can also use the charger of an old Nokia phone. Also, the bot can easily carry weight of about 4kg.
Even though the boys are done with their project they have already brainstorming on another.
“Even though our vacations have begun we are going to start work on making a home automation system. We would show this to a company as part of our internship,” said Sondkar.