CUTTACK: An ‘AI Teacher’ may soon take classes and help students under engineering fundamentals at the Bhubanananda Odisha School of Engineering (BOSE).
A group of three final-year diploma students of Electronics and Telecommunication branch - Amarendra Swain, Sadakant Jena and Zaheer Shaikh - have developed a Pi Robot (a small, low-cost computer that’s useful for robotics projects) model AI (artificial intelligence) teacher that, they said, can be used for enhancing the learning experience of students.
The students were inspired by Iris, who is India’s first AI-generated school teacher robot. A Kerala-based private organisation Makerlabs Edutech had prepared Iris earlier this year and it was introduced in a school there. While Iris is powered by cutting-edge robotics, generative AI technology and features an in-built voice assistant, the one prepared by BOSE students uses similar techniques.
It can answer any question related to any subject, the students said, while exhibiting the robot teacher at design and innovation centre (DIC) of BOSE. It took them six months to develop the AI teacher but prior to that, they put in four months of research into the project.
“We were actually asked by our principal to prepare a robot teacher like the one in Kerala. We studied the Kerala project for four months before we started work on our AI teacher. The primary aim was to have a mechanism which can clear all doubts of students in our institution,” Amarendra said. While the three students have also done coding of the robot, all the electrical and mechanical parts used in the model have been manufactured in BOSE. “As we do not have a server, we are using ChatGPT which stores data on secure servers,” said Sadakant.
Principal of the institution Hrusikesh Mohanty said the students were provided an experiment to integrate artificial intelligence into practicals and they decided to build the AI teacher. “They have done everything from scratch, be it designing the AI platform, voice recognition system, building the humanoid robot’s neck, eyes, lips and legs to coding it,” he said.
The Pi Robot can run for five to six hours and teach like an AI teacher, said Mohanty.