A Robotics Engineer, Mr
Michael Ipinyomi, has advocated the use of robots to solve the country’s problems.
Ipinyomi made the call during the Disruptive Africa Expo 2016 holding in Lagos, with the theme: “Remaining Sustainable through Innovation in the Technology Disruption Era’’.
He said that a robot was a machine capable of carrying out complex series of actions automatically, especially one programmable by a computer.
According to him, some of the major problems in Nigeria are corruption, crime, terrorism, unemployment, education system, the environment, infrastructure, healthcare, road accidents, among others.
Ipinyomi, who is also the author of the book “Zoom Robotics’’, said that robots were supposed to assist human beings to make life easier, allaying the fear that robots would take over the jobs of humans.
“Robots optimise systems that have been made by humans; hence, robots cannot replace human beings.
“We can use robots to solve Nigeria’s problems. There is crime here and there in the country, but with robots, we can reduce crime and add value to human life.
“Instead of endangering the lives of people to clear a dumpsite, you can deploy a robot to do the clearing and within the shortest possible time,’’ the robotics engineer said.
He said that the challenges associated with the use of the robots in the country included infrastructure and market size.
According to Ipinyomi, most of the infrastructure used in developing robots is imported and very few people are interested in the resources that robots have to offer.
He said that developing robots required a pooling of mental and financial resources, which were presently limited.
Ipinyomi said that the issue of ethics on how to use robots should be cultural as each country should suggest how it should be used.
He said that the vision of leveraging technology to improve the lives of people found ways to make conventional robots more intelligent.