Guiding a new crop of roboticists

One STORY robot inventor Dr Yeong Che Fai never tires of telling his students is of the time his robotic maid conked out just the night before the final judging of the Robofest event in 2004.

“My wife Eileen Su, who now lectures in the same university, was in competition with me. We were doing our final testing before closing up for the day when we discovered the phasing between the laptop and the interfacing card was out,” recalls Yeong, 34, now senior lecturer at the faculty of electrical engineering in University Teknologi Malaysia in Skudai.