Project-based competitions are an effective way to maintain students’ interest and motivation and to help them achieve practical learning outcomes in their studies. INTI’s annual integrated circuit (IC) design competition held at its campus in Penang has served to spur innovation among students and offered a platform for them to prove their industry-ready capabilities to industry judges, making the learning process more attractive.
Irfan Shah, during the Q&A session after he presented his Driver Assistance System: Forward Collision Warning System project for the IC design competition.
“Since most high-end vehicles already have the feature of the forward collision avoidance system, what about the lower-end vehicles that most people are using in Malaysia?” thought Irfan Shah bin Shah Mahal Khan, 24, a Bachelor in Electrical and Electronics Engineering student.
With this question in mind, Irfan built the Driver Assistance System: Forward Collision Warning System which reduces traffic accidents that are not only targeted towards other cars but also people, motorcycles and trucks.
A participant in the Oppstar Innovation Challenge 2020, a yearly competition organised by the School of Engineering and Technology (SOEAT) at INTI International College Penang in collaboration with Oppstar Technology, a home-grown semiconductor design house that focuses on IC design, Irfan fully immersed in this subset of electronics engineering, which encompasses the logic and circuit design techniques required to design integrated circuits or ICs – a set of electronic circuits consisting of miniaturised electronic components built into electrical networks.
Grasping the core knowledge of IC design, Irfan presented his project during the competition using self-produced engaging visuals, which clearly illustrated how the driver assistance system could avoid frontal collisions between vehicles. The technology worked around with the early detection of people, cars, motorcycles, bicycles and trucks, calculating their distance and alerting the driver based on the distance of these objects from the driver’s vehicle.
“When any of these objects are relatively close to the driver’s vehicles, the system automatically triggers the brakes to either slow down the vehicle or bring it to a complete stop, depending on how close the object is,” explained Irfan.
“The toughest challenge in this project was understanding how NVIDIA Jetson Nano works and learning the python programming language that is required to run the programme,” continued the STEM lover who will soon focus on his Master’s studies in E&E engineering to bring this project to the next level.
As an undergraduate, Irfan saw the opportunity of participating in this project-based competition whilst conducting his final year project as a challenge for himself to test his capabilities, and also to provide him with the better motivation to keep working harder in achieving his targets in his academic performance.
“This competition has improved my level of critical thinking as it required a lot of preparation throughout the entire project period, from the aspects of building the project up to the questions that would be asked by the assessors,” stated Irfan upon clinching the first prize with an RM1000 in cash.
Gan Shu Fen (2nd from right at the back row) with her coursemates from the 3+0 Bachelor of Engineering (Hons) in Electrical and Electronic Engineering programme, in collaboration with Coventry University, UK.
Held amidst the pandemic of Covid-19, the competition was conducted fully online, where its second prize winner Gan Shu Fen, 21, found herself picking up a new skill in video capturing and editing as she needed to do a virtual presentation with a video demo for her project – Gesture to Text Conversion using Leap Motion Controller.
Also in her final year of pursuing a Bachelor in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Coventry University, UK, a 3+0 programme offered at INTI, Shu Fen worked on a project that could convert sign languages into text by using a hand motion detection device called Leap Motion Controller, with a model built using Convolution Neural Networks to predict the correct outputs.
“The main objective of this project was to build a gesture recognition system with high accuracy, durability and reliability, that is also user-friendly and cost-effective to break down communication barriers between the community with hearing loss and normally abled people. Not everyone understands sign language, but with this gesture recognition system, everyone can communicate with each other as it allows conversion to text or even makes sentences out of it, or even read out the signed sentence,” Shu Fen explained the working mechanism of her project.
“My project is on Deep Learning which are algorithms inspired by the human brain. It allows for a large amount of data learning as more data will increase the accuracy,” shared Shu Fen and further indicated that the innovation elements in this project included the centroid coordinate of each bone of a hand being transformed into the data for the Leap Motion Controller, and also the feature extraction by Dual-Tree Complex Wavelet Transform.
Shu Fen especially thanked her project supervisor who guided her to overcome her challenges and finish her project for the competition.
“The ideas and suggestions provided by the panel of judges which was made up of INTI’s lecturers and the professionals from Oppstar Technology opened up my mind to think in a wider scope of view,” said Shu Fen, cheerfully.
Tan Seng Hooi, holding the prototypes he developed for the project on Swarm Intelligence: Autonomous Convergence Bots, which theory can be applied in autonomous cars.
A coursemate of both Irfan and Shu Fen, Tan Seng Hooi, 22, developed a project titled Swarm Intelligence: Autonomous Convergence Bots, picking up swarm intelligence to stand out from the other competitors.
“I put in a lot of effort and time to design, construct, build and test the hardware of five identical robots with one as a spare, and this is only 40% of my project. The remaining 60% was on the research and design of the algorithm and methods, developing software codes for the robots, alongside the development of a companion mobile application using flutter, which allows the app to be compatible on both Android and IOS platforms,” introduced Seng Hooi.
To give us a clue on how his project would one day benefit the general public, Seng Hooi explained, while demonstrating the concept of swarm intelligence – how the collective behaviour of a group of animals, especially social insects such as ants or bees – can be applied to robots. His project was demonstrated by three to four simple robots that worked together to find each other with very simple sensors.
“Its future application could be in autonomous cars where they work together to navigate through traffic!” said the Penang Future Foundation Scholarship holder.
Due to the lack of readily available resources online, Seng Hooi’s main struggle during the process was keeping to his timeline for research, implementation as well as numerous experiments to achieve the optimum result. In the meantime, he also needed to juggle his other course subjects and projects, as well as doing part-time one on one tutoring jobs to keep up with his bills and expenses, all of which ultimately led him to multiple sleepless nights.
His hard work paid off when the organiser announced his victory among the Top-3 winners.
“I appreciated the process of developing the project the most as it enabled me to develop problem-solving skills, knowledge, and the experience of working on something that can be used in the long term. Upon winning this competition, I celebrated by having a good meal and then continued to further develop the project as it was also my Final Year Project (FYP) for my Electrical and Electronic Engineering Degree. It still requires a lot more work to achieve the specifications of my FYP,” said Seng Hooi.
Congratulating all seven students of INTI’s Bachelor’s degree and Diploma in E&E engineering studies who were selected for the finals, Hemalatha Murugiah, Chief Executive of INTI International College Penang also expressed her appreciation to Oppstar Technology Sdn Bhd, for not only their joined efforts in organising the event but also their long term commitments in co-nurturing future talents in IC design who will meet the industry needs to build the nation.