Final Project Concept:

Robotic "Gatekeeper" / Automatic Attendance Tracker / Gift distributor

Problem: At the IRA, an extra-curricular lab, children come to prepare for Robotics competitions, working independently with their teams.

The staff should take attendance every 2 hours but sometimes forget and sometimes children come at odd time and stay for an unspecified time. Now the academy is set to expand in size with the addition of another hall, making it even more difficult to track the attendance of the 100 or so children on competition teams.

Solution: Robot “gatekeeper” - a facial recognition system which also records the time the child enters and leaves. And distributes candy.

It would require a screen which clearly communicates that the child is registered as both entering and later exiting. It may include a kind of arm which is blocking the door and then is raised after the child is recognised.

At a higher level, the system should be able to display the names of children currently in the lab for confirmation and verification by staff. The system would ideally aggregate that information at the end of the month and convert for billing purposes.

It should also have fun aspects like dispensing food / candy, in keeping with the positive and welcoming educational environment. Logically, if a machine is sophisticated enough to take attendance, it should also be able to dispense candies or something else.

Here is the initial sketch of the project which details some of the possible features.

Perhaps a simplified implementation would just be to recognize a child, and if the child shows his/her face 3 hours apart in the same day,

they get a candy bar. It means they are working in the lab for a long time and need some sustenance to keep working.

Perhaps the facial recognition idea is too complicated and better to just distribute key cards for scanning.