Kevin McGlinchey, a final year student in the Electronic & Computer Engineering degree programme at NUI Galway, has been awarded the Avaya Prize for the Best Final Year Project in Electrical & Electronic Engineering in the College of Engineering at NUI Galway.

Originally from Letterkenny, Co. Donegal, Kevin's project was in the area of collaborative robotics and involved developing a system which allowed a miniature quadcopter equipped with a camera to fly autonomously, while also guiding a ground based robot vehicle to a destination location using information extracted from the camera’s video feed.   

Liam Kilmartin, the lecturer in NUI Galway who supervised Kevin’s project, said: “Kevin completed a very impressive project which required him to build some quite complex electronic systems for the quadcopter and ground robot. In addition, Kevin also developed some extremely advanced and sophisticated software which allowed the quadcopter to interpret the video coming from its camera in order to identify the location of a ground robot and guide that vehicle to its destination without any human help. This type of technology has potentially numerous commercial applications into the future ranging from self navigating aerial and ground vehicles to autonomous search and rescue systems.”

Dr Michael Keane, Senior Manager with Avaya in Galway added: “As part of our ongoing commitment to encouraging and supporting students in the Electrical & Electronic Engineering discipline in NUI Galway, we were delighted to extend our sponsorship of this prize into its 13^th year. Avaya, who employ 400 people in Galway with 200 in high technology R&D positions, are dedicated to encouraging high quality students such as Kevin into degree programmes in the areas of computer engineering and ICT in order to fill the many open graduate positions in Irish based companies like ourselves.”

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