On Wednesday last week, the Federal Minister of Interior and Planning, Development, and Reform, Ahsan Iqbal inaugurated the National Centre of Robotics and Automation (NCRA) at NUST College of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering.
Built on a consortium model, the Robotics Center comprises of 11 labs across the country. Twelve other Pakistani universities are also to be a part of this initiative, with two labs to be established at NUST, the remaining will be set up at other universities that have been selected through a rigorous selection process by HEC and Planning Commission of Pakistan. These universities include: UET Lahore, UET Peshawar, UET Taxila, UCP Lahore, ITU Lahore, Air University Islamabad, LUMS, FAST-NUCES Islamabad, NED Karachi, MUET Mirpur, BUITEMS Quetta, and MUST University.
Dr. Ather Osama speaking about the center said that these national centers are to work through shared resources and expertise towards developing projects that will have a high national impact. At the inauguration, the Federal Minister expressed his immense pride in inaugurating the last of four centers of excellence that the government planned to establish in this year. He also said that this would lead Pakistan toward knowledge economy in the future. The previous centers that have been inaugurated are the Centre of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence at NUST, Cyber Security Centre at Air University, Cloud Computing and Big Data Centre at LUMS.
