Md Tanzil Shahria, a doctoral student, computer science, has been awarded a $2,500 stipend to support his research in designing robotic devices to assist mobility-challenged people.
Shahria is designing a vision-based assistive robot control system that allows users with disabilities to identify and locate objects, use the robotic grippers to manipulate them, and perform pick-and-place tasks by speaking commands rather than manually manipulating the robot.
Shahria, a member of Professor Habib Rahman’s mechanical engineering lab, is creating a deep learning-based model that also uses a depth camera and mapping function to detect and interact with items.
The support is part of the Fall 2024 “Student Scholars Program” of the Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute (NMDSI).
This is Shahria’s third consecutive award from NMDSI, and the support has allowed him to develop different components of this system over several semesters.
The NMDSI is a partnership among the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Marquette University and Northwestern Mutual that aims to make southeastern Wisconsin a national hub for data science technology, research, business and talent development.