Birr student wins prestigious award

A Birr native has been awarded for having the best final year project in electrical and electronic engineering at NUI Galway.

Joseph Fleury won the award with a project focused on the development of an autonomous robot system capable of navigating itself around an area using its own computer vision system.

The system is part of a research study in the university on the feasibility of using intelligent robot systems to remove weeds in commercial crop and vegetable growing operations.

Senior manager with awarding company Avaya Dr Michael Keane said the prize is in place to encourage and support students in the electrical and electronic engineering discipline at NUI Galway.

“We were delighted to award Joseph this year’s prize,” he said. “There is an ever-present need to encourage high quality students such as Joseph into degree programmes in this area in order to fill the many open graduate positions in the areas of ICT and software development in companies like ourselves in Avaya.”

Lecturer Martin Glavin, who also supervised Joseph’s project, said Joseph’s work was a worthy winner.

“Joseph’s project was incredibly sophisticated in that he not only had to build the robot, integrate electronic circuitry and write the software to control it but he also had to develop and test complex mathematical image analysis techniques which would allow the robot to ‘see’ and navigate,” he said.

“His project is an excellent example of how industry focussed post-graduate research expertise within our discipline permeates our under-graduate degree programmes in order to produce engineers with experience in relevant and cutting edge technologies.”