CSE Dept., KUET Developed a Prototype Driving Simulator

Everyday we are accustomed to learn that a lot of people died by road accident. Now-a-days, we don't have any feeling about the heavy loss of lives by road accidents. Because, it is a common-phenomena in our daily life. Most of the cases it happened due to poor driving performances of the drivers. Of course some cases are due to out of order vehicles. Noted actor, Elias Kanchan, became vocal when he lost his beloved wife.  Now he is leading a movement for "Nirapad Sorok Chai".  Most of the drivers are illiterate and they don't have formal training for driving licenses. It is open secret or crystal clear that driving licenses can be bought by using a moderate amount of ransom money from corrupt BRTA authority ( I was also offered to get one without having any formal training and test). These drivers are used to drive our costly vehicles (average price more than 10 Lacs). Sometimes we the valuable persons (e.g., President/Prime Minister) are in the hand of them. Our fate completely depends on them for reaching to our destinations. We are in lack of well-equipped training schools and test beds. Even though we have some but they are so costly that the middle class people unable to afford it. To alleviate this notorious problem, our CSE dept came one step forward to train our next generation drivers by making a prototype driving simulator.

 

How the idea came?

 

Jahanabad (Gilatola) Cantonment is next to our varsity. They have a ASC school for giving driving training for its soldiers. This is the only driving training school for our soldiers. They have a driving simulator set with eight driver training facilities. It is completely networked and it can be used to evaluate the driving simulation performance of the individuals. So far we know, it was bought from USA by expending over 2 corer Taka during 2000-2001. It is a Windows NT based system. Recently all of the simulators were out of order. You know why? They don't have expert engineer/programmer to take care of them. One of my ex-student, Major Engr Ahmed, was in charge of it. One day he came to my office and approached me to repair them. I agreed with his invitation gladly. We went there immediately. My colleagues and I tried hard to repair the system. After expending few hours, we solved all of the problems gracefully. At that moment, we discovered that this system is not suitable enough and the technology is quite back dated. Major Ahmed told me that we were about to throw it in the garbage. We wondered how funny they are! We offered them to give a better local solution. They don't require spending huge amount of money. If they offer us the one-fourth of that money, we are able to produce the same but improved version of the simulators.  My colleagues, Atiq and Nazrul, told me, "Sir, we are going to initiate a 3rd year project for developing a prototype version of it". Instantly, I agreed with them.  I told them, I will support you in all aspects of the said project. They offered the projects to the students. Eight daunting students came forwards to take the challenge. They started working hard day and night. Despite a lot of hurdles before them, they developed a prototype within 60 days which is a better version of the current simulator!