| Popis: |
During this covid-19 pandemic most of the countries have successfully conducted the parliamentary, state, and local elections. It was unfortunate that few candidates have been infected by the virus and lost their golden time in canvassing during their election campaign. One of the candidates (name and state kept anonymous) who was contesting elections in India was infected by the virus just 15 days before the election. The candidate isolated himself and was under medical treatment in hospital for few days. So, we intended to assist the candidate by modifying our SHRALA (Social Humanoid Robot based on Autonomous Learning Algorithm) as a campaign robot. Despite the challenging pandemic situation and limited availability of the resources the robot was designed, fabricated, tested, and deployed in less than 5 days. This paper discusses the approach and experience in the design, fabrication, testing and deployment of SHRALA robot in the election campaign. The robot performed beyond our expectation as it attracted more people towards it, most of them were curiously interacting with the robot and taking selfies. Based on our experience, future directions of the campaign robot are suggested as these robots can make huge impact in the election campaign strategy. |
