The Sunday News
Nokukhanya Moyo, Sunday News Reporter
A 24-year-old student from Chinhoyi University of Technology (CUT) has designed an automatic pothole filler.
Mpumelelo Ncube from Bulawayo, studying Bachelor of Engineering honours degree in Mechanics will be participating in National Engineering Students Awards Competitions (NESAC) for universities and colleges. The preliminary rounds will be held on 2 June at CUT. All Zimbabwe universities and colleges are expected to take part in this competition.
Ncube has done two final projects which include a design and manufacture of automatic pothole filler and a design of a colour-based object sorting robotic arm.
“An automatic pothole filler which is basically an autonomous vehicle that navigates the roads unmanned, searching for potholes and upon detecting them, stops and fills it, eliminating monotonous human labour.”
He said the drive behind the project was to come up with a low cost solution that would address the looming pothole problem on Zimbabwean roads that has claimed many lives. The prototype was developed using cheap, locally sourced scrap materials, also addressing the pollution problem in the process.
“The colour-based object sorting robotic arm is a robotic manipulator arm that sorts objects moving along a conveyor belt according to colour, placing them in their respective pre-programmed packages.”
The project was inspired by the monotony of having to sort apples in an apple farm, eliminating human error resulting from fatigue. He said that he was hoping to get a trophy for his university.
“My vision is to engage other innovative minds and the corporate world, partnering them to provide low cost industrial automation solutions to avert the problem of industrial closure that has seen Zimbabwe going in a southbound economic trek for the past decade or so and work together to restore our country to its former glory.”
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