Khor Jun Bin won Best FYP Project Award for robot project

Certificate of Merit received by Khor

A project related to robot service by UTAR Lee Kong Chian Faculty of Engineering and Science student Khor Jun Bin caught the judges’ attention at the 2020 IEEE EMBS Malaysia Chapter Final Year Project (FYP) Competition as he won the Best FYP Project Award on 1 November 2020. The project titled “Implementation of Machine Vision on Service Robot” was selected as the research track winner for Track 5: Biomedical Robots & Smart Implant.

The 2020 IEEE EMBS Malaysia Chapter Final Year Project (FYP) Competition was an online submission competition, held in September 2020. It had nine categories and was open to undergraduates who have completed or currently doing their FYP in the year 2020.

“My project focuses on “Robot Eyes” which allow the robot to understand their environment through their robot “eye”, a camera. This includes face detection, object detection and localisation, gesture detection and others through the latest deep learning technology and traditional method of image processing. The project will delve into the adoption of game engines such as Unity and the concept of domain randomisation to synthesis of high-quality labeled data for the training of detection model,” Khor described his project.

Robot Eyes, which serves as a function for the robot to make sense of its surrounding, is a part of five basic components of a service robot. The other components are Robot Mouth and Ears for human-robot interaction, Robot Legs for autonomous navigation, Robot Arms for object manipulation and Robot Brain for data processing.

Speaking of the challenges, he said, “Despite the endless opportunity in this subject, gathering high-quality labeled data to train deep learning models continues to be a major challenge. Factors that make it difficult for an organisation to collect sufficient labeled data includes privacy and regulatory concerns and the concern on objects that are rare, expensive, or dangerous to recreate in real life, as well as other reasons.”

As a word of advice, he encouraged others to always try new things and step out of the comfort zone. Quoting Carol S. Dweck, he said, “The hallmark of successful people is that they are always stretching themselves to learn new things.”