An engineer's fiery passion for robots

Doraemon, the robotic cartoon cat from Japan, was the early inspiration for a young Rex Sham Pui-sum and the reason he got into robotics. On the day he discovered that Doraemon did not exist in real life, the then schoolboy set about creating his own.

Sham, 29, studied engineering at Chinese University before starting his own company, then called Hong Kong Robotics. His first foray into business involved creating custom designed circuit boards for factory automation and education.

But an investor who saw potential in him and his inventions enabled him to move forward in his field. Sham then created a fire detection robot that can be used in country parks to detect even very small fires.

The Computer Vision Wildfire Detection System uses a robot equipped with thermal imaging sensors and advanced artificial intelligence vision technology. It can detect and locate wood- or vegetation-based fires - as small as two metres by one metre in size - within a 5km radius, covering up to nearly 80 sq km of forest and living area.

The robot then sends real-time images and the location of the fire to control centres for manual or computer analysis, allowing local fire services to stop the fire from spreading.

Sham's company, now known as Insight Robotics, has sold 60 such robots to the mainland for use in its country parks.

"This month and the next, we will be setting up a pilot site with the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department in Tai Mo Shan," Sham says. If the department approves Sham's robot fire detection system, it will put forward a budget plan to the Legislative Council in 2016, he said.