A top University of Malta engineering graduate, Reuben Ferrante, has turned his micro-robot final-year project into eeMod – an educational tool for schools, and a competitive, feature-rich and modular building-block for engineers and researchers.

In less than a year, Ferrante turned his final-year project into a business called www.eeroots.com, with a little encouragement from the Faculty of Engineering and the University’s Takeoff Business Incubator.  He designed a platform that integrates the maker’s favourite sensors, tools and controllers, all without any wires or connections. The platform comprises Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi, infrared sensors, motor control, light sensors, colour sensor, compass, gyro, accelerometer, SD card slot and USB on one platform the size of a fist.

Ferrante worked out everything, from design, mass-manufacturing, logistics, company image, and a slick crowd-funding campaign, that went live on www.zaar.com.mt  and www.indiegogo.com, and has already secured several orders.

The micro-robot is a handy tool to have in order to learn, conduct research or to create products with ease, but can also be used to play games.

Ferrante intends to promote the product among secondary schools, sixth forms and foreign academia, as he thinks physics and each engineering technology class could use the device. “It is a handy tool to learn and to create products, but can also be used to play games. Students could typically use it for debugging and learning embedded programming as well as prototyping for a final project that would include such sensors,” he said.

eeMods could be used for engineering research, such as transforming the module into a robot and having a group of them communicating together to perform a task cohesively – a research area known as swarm robotics. It has applications varying from auto­nomous surveillance to transportation. Swarm robotics research can demonstrate swarm intelligence behaviour in a physical environment, such as to show some traffic-management patterns without having to build such devices from scratch every time.

The robots can network wirelessly and truly come to life when they operate in numbers. Market alternatives with a comparable feature-set are much more expensive, making them impractical.

The robots are being offered at a price that is accessible to students and schools and may be pre-ordered through the crowd-funding webpage https://igg.me/at/eemod .

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWAll_nw-7o