Published:
Mohd Azim Abdul Rahman from Heriot-Watt University Malaysia has won the IET Control & Automation Technical Network Malaysia Chapter Award 2020 with the project titled “IoT Autonomous 3D Mapping Drone”. This prestigious award is given to the best control and automation final year project (FYP) among undergraduate students in Malaysia.
The award-winning project uses a low-cost drone for the surveyor to collect data from an ongoing construction project. The images that are captured by the drone will be reconstructed using the photogrammetry technique to derive a 3D model which is then compared against the project status. To smoothen this process, Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) cloud computing is integrated to ease data processing and management.
Ir Dr Bhuvendhraa Rudrusamy, an Assistant Professor from the School of Engineering and Physical Sciences (EPS) nominated three automation-related FYPs for the award as follows:
- Mohd Azim Abdul Rahman, “IoT Autonomous 3D Mapping Drone”
- Lim Chun Zhe, “Stereoscopic-Based Lane Detection for Urban Environment”
- Julian Goh Hui Man, “Unsupervised Iris Localization based on median thresholding, circular mask and contour moment for Driver’s Drowsiness Detection”
Mohd Azim said that the project was challenging as the drone needed to be built from the ground up to not only fly autonomously, but also to be incorporated into AWS properly. The world of cloud computing was also new to him but he took it as a challenge. After several months of research, he finally managed to get the whole system running on the cloud. He would like to thank the school and his supervisor Dr Mohsen Bazghalel for the opportunity to take on this project.