Today, educational institutions aspire not only to produce students who can keep up with and respond to technological advances but students who can drive technological progress and innovations.
Every year, many students from different educational institutions honour their university with their academic and scientific achievements and innovations. Sultan Qaboos University has always enjoyed this honour. A team at Sultan Qaboos University has developed an innovative technology for airport baggage transfers.
The team comprised five Mechatronics engineering students, namely Ahmed al Jabri, Ammar al Shidi, Asasd al Abri, and Ola al Mousawi under the supervision of Prof Said al Abri, Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, develops a Baggage Transfer Autonomous Tractor for Airport.
Baggage Transfer Autonomous Tractor is a vision system that is capable to perform sign detection, path detection, object detection, and recognition. These functions are critical to autonomous vehicle systems as they enable the vehicle to recognise and track key features of its surroundings.
The self-driving vehicle system is fortified with a C program utilising an Arduino as a microcontroller to control the vehicle’s motors, which is essential since it allows the car to move and navigate around its environment.
The team looks forward to developing their project by integrating additional components such as a decision-making algorithm and sensor fusion. Also, they are designing an environment that simulates the actual environment at Muscat International Airport. Thus, they can test their systems in real life.
Team members look forward to transforming this project of their graduation project into an emerging company that design self-driving systems. They are planning to provide services to Oman’s airports, especially to transport cargo from and to aircraft, which is of great benefit to the company operating the airport and all logistics operations.
Working as a team redouble the gain that team members gain during their work. As well as gaining technical and scientific knowledge through research and collaboration, they also acquire teamwork skills and apply the knowledge gained in the bachelor’s degree programme.
“One of the most important takeaways I gained while working on the project was teamwork and how to organise and plan a team to work towards a goal. We faced many challenges, and thank God, thanks to the efforts made by all team members, in addition to the support of the team’s supervisor, Prof Al Abri, we were able to deliver good results,” Al Shidi expressed.
