IEEE’s Change the world Competition

I got a mail from one of the representative of IEEE mentioning about “Change the world Competition”, for which 15 finalist have submitted their ideas. I was really impressed. The reason being, its not one of those regular startup PR pitches. This is a contest that gives students from across the world an opportunity to demonstrate excellence in the development, design and implementation of technology that solves a real-life problem, and ultimately benefits humanity.

Listed below are some of the projects:

Guide Robot for the Blind
This project is trying to improve the dynamic of the blind people when traveling from one point to other and while they are in a building or group of facilities.

AGROBOT
The idea of applying Robotics in agriculture is very new. The main area of application of robots in agriculture is at the cultivation stage. The agricultural industry is behind other industries in using robots because the sort of jobs involved in agriculture are not straight forward and many repetitive tasks are not exactly the same every time. In most cases, a lot of factors have to be considered (i.e.: Environmental conditions and nature of crop) before the commencement of a task.

Project Spread The Light
The Nigerian state has over the years been experiencing an epileptic power supply, transmission and distribution problems. The spread the light project is an initiative we developed to address the electricity problem in Nigeria from a small scale perspective. due to the abundance supply of sunlight in Nigeria a tropical country we designed a solar energy generation module which utilize this abundant sun hours ( an average of 9hrs) to provide electricity in a small settlement in the eastern part of the country. The settlement has been off the grid with no plan of being connected in the near future.

I know these projects are not as fancy as twitter/facebook/myspace apps, but they are done for a noble cause. So if you guys have some spare time, go ahead and vote for the best project.