Turkish students design ‘pilgrim robot’

BİNGÖL

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.