A
group of middle school students in the eastern province of Bingöl have
designed a robot that performs the religious duties of the hajj while
sporting the proper hajj attire and circumambulating a mock-up of the
Kaaba.
The robot, designed by three students, Muhammed Ömür
Taşar, Muhammed Avcı and Metehan Satık, under the leadership of their
technology design teacher, Mahmut Baloğlu, was produced as part of a
scientific fair project from the Scientific and Technical Research
Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK).
“We wanted to find an interesting
topic for the TÜBİTAK fair and wanted to handle the subject of robots
that the students in Turkey don’t know that well,” said Baloğlu, adding
that they examined the robots used for educational purposes and picked
one for the project.
“Starting from that robot, we wanted the
students to assign a task to another robot via composing algorithms. The
students selected the religious duties of the pilgrimage, and we tasked
the robot with performing three duties of the pilgrimage with program
coding,” he said.
The robot was completed with a budget of 300
Turkish Liras, but Baloğlu said they were waiting for support in order
to enhance the robot.
“We were able to do this much with our own
means. If we find support and sponsors in the future, we can enhance
the robot in order to make it perform the other obligations of the
pilgrimage,” Baloğlu also said.
The “Pilgrim Robot” came in third place in a technology competition in the eastern province of Malatya.