A robot developed by 12 school students will soon be deployed by the Thane traffic police to help pedestrians cross roads and spread awareness about road safety.
Thane traffic police will first introduce the safety robot, named Roadeo, at public places, schools and colleges during the road safety week, which will start from February 4 and go on till February 10.
Roadeo has been built by 12 schoolchildren, who are between the age group of 13 and 14, from Pune, Chennai and Thane cities.
The team includes five students from Thane.
A similar model of the robot has been introduced in Chennai and Pune for traffic awareness.
The students were trained at a private lab centre in Thane. Professional robot makers had guided the children in preparing the various codes and developing road safety messages
“These codes and messages were then fed into the robot,” said Adwait Patkhedkar, 14, student of Rainbow International School, Thane.
Roadeo can be integrated with the traffic signals, can be operated manually or via Bluetooth. The robot has two hands to interact with people and displaying traffic signs.
“The robots has been developed on a computerised system through programming and codes,” said one of the professionals that trained the students to make the robot.
The robot runs on electrical charge. Once charged, the robot can function for around three to four hours.
Deputy commissioner of police (traffic), Thane, Amit Kale, said that Raodeo is India’s first road safety robot.
The robot, Kale said, will be first introduced at the road safety week carried by the traffic team from February 4 to 10.
Then, it will be deployed at public places like malls and thereafter, in the schools and colleges.
“The robot will also be deployed at various junctions, displaying safety messages and signs. We hope school children learn about road safety,” said Kale.
Bhavya Bhosale, 13, a student from Euro School, Thane, who was also part of the team that made the robot, hopes to make similar models of Roadeo.
“We are happy to be part of the team that has developed the robot. We wish to continue our training to make more such models of Roadeo,” said
Kale said the specialty about this robot is that it has been prepared by the school children.
“We started training to develop the robot one and half months ago. We used to spend nearly three to four hours to develop this model,” said Pranav Iyer , student of CP Goenka School, Thane.
The traffic police’s road safety week will involve around 250 schools and 40 colleges from Thane district.
The traffic police will organise workshops for school bus drivers, auto drivers and heavy vehicles operators during the road safety week.
First Published: Feb 03, 2019 00:36 IST
