Edifixio's social robot Bot-So wins Oracle IoT Developer award

The Internet of Things category is about to grow exponentially over the next few years. Google, Intel, **Microsoft**, **MediaTek** and other leading tech companies are getting behind IoT products.

Google’s Nest Labs announced a **platform for connected everyday devices and smart homes in the form of Thread**. But there has been a lot of movement in IoT from independent companies and startups.

Oracle Technology Network and Oracle Academy have now announced the winners of the Oracle IoT Developer global challenge. And Bot-So was chosen as one of three winning entries, besides the Belarus and Spain entries.  Kolkata-based Edifixio won the contest with the Bot-So, a smart social robot that interacts with users via Twitter. The robot can be deployed for remote home surveillance by sending commands via Twitter. Tweets will trigger the robot to survey a particular space when a motion detector is triggered. Developed by Debraj Dutta, Tapas Bose, and Avinaba Majumder from Edifixio, Bot-So has been developed using Java.

Speaking about the win, Debraj Dutta, Director, Edifixio said, “We’ve all had a wonderful experience fabricating BOT-SO. It’s not just a robot; we tried to personify it by making it present in social media. We are really excited about this project and believe it will have a lot of good use in society. We look forward to doing a lot more things to take BOT-SO further and be a key contributor to the IoT revolution.”

The entry from Belarus was also a winner, and it’s a full-featured, automated greenhouse to grow indoor plants. The Smart Greenhouse lets a farmer remotely control and monitor light, temperature and humidity of the ecosystem using an application.  The Spanish entry was for a connected office space. The Lhings connected table allows users to set up their preferred office environment using RFID chips. This smart table connects with the smartphone to update an employee’s presence in the space. The RFID chip also allows automatic billing if the employee has coffee from a coffee machine in the room.

In addition three teams from Tunisia, Morocco and Russia won the contest in the Students category. The winning entries included ePot smart gardening that enabled remote access to control the environment for indoor gardening (Tunisia), an authentication system that used voice recognition for login (Russia) and a conference voting system (Morocco) that helps rate conference sessions, presentations and keynotes using NFC chip on the back of attendee badge.