Also, distance education can benefit undergraduate students or interns while acquiring new skills to improve their careers. Since accessing online lectures and courses is effortless thanks to online course providers, distance education allows students to obtain new skills, certifications, and degrees with the highest course quality, even from renowned pioneers of various fields.

Nonetheless, distance education still lacks the glamour of providing directions or suggestions without a live Q&A session while working on a student project or a solution for a real-world problem. Since it is crucial to give students insightful and engaging feedback while conducting experiments, distance education methods are yet dependent on the availability of constructive Q&A sessions for experiment-based learning.

After scrutinizing recent research papers on distance education, I noticed there are very few methods focusing on applying object detection with artificial intelligence to provide auto-generated insightful suggestions and guidance, especially for lab-related studies. Since lab-related studies rely on experiments with different types of lab equipment, I decided to build an AI-driven interactive lab assistant counseling students regarding lab equipment, their proper utilization, and history.

Since lab equipment can be opaque, transparent, in various shapes, and change volume depending on the research subject, it is arduous to construct a valid and notable data set for object detection models. Thus, I decided to employ OpenCV modification features to convert images to generate meaningful data samples for diverse lab equipment regardless of their complex structures. Depending on the given lab equipment, I utilized canny edge detection, erosion and dilation morphological operators, Gaussian blur, and color space conversions so as to generate unique and meaningful samples.

Since NVIDIA Jetson Nano is a compact and easy-to-use platform tailored for running multiple neural networks in parallel for applications like image classification, object detection, segmentation, and speech processing, I decided to utilize Jetson Nano as the centerpiece of this lab assistant. To collect lab equipment images (samples), I connected a high-quality USB webcam to Jetson Nano.

In order to construct my data set, I established a basic laboratory, including various lab equipment related to biology, chemistry, and physics. After applying and testing different OpenCV features on the camera feed for each lab equipment, I collected my data samples so as to construct a notable data set.

After completing my data set, I built my object detection model with Edge Impulse to detect diverse lab equipment from my laboratory. I utilized the Edge Impulse FOMO (Faster Objects, More Objects) algorithm to train my model, which is a novel machine learning algorithm that brings object detection to highly constrained devices. Since Edge Impulse is nearly compatible with all microcontrollers and development boards, I have not encountered any issues while uploading and running my model on Jetson Nano. As labels, I utilized the names of each lab equipment (10 classes). Furthermore, while developing this project, I employed some Edge Impulse Enterprise features to improve device accessibility, as described in the following steps.

After training and testing my object detection (FOMO) model, I deployed and uploaded the model on Jetson Nano as a Linux (AARCH64) application (.eim). Therefore, this lab assistant is capable of detecting lab equipment by running the model independently without any additional procedures or latency. Even though the RGB image format is required to run the model with the Python SDK, I managed to run my model with the modified frames, according to the applied OpenCV features for each lab equipment while collecting data, by iterating temporary image files as modified samples. Thus, the model accuracy is vastly increased for on-device real-time analytics.

Since I...