Me and a couple people here at the school have started a robotics club. Why robots?
I promise it’s not a robot army. I swear.
Before I started school, over a year ago in the summer of 2018, I went to the campus grounds to chat with one of the teachers here who took the time out of his schedule to talk to me about his class. I did some digging before hand and I found out he had previously worked on a satellite that was going to be sent into orbit. When I asked him about it, he said that he joined the group when he transferred over to the University of Victoria from Camosun. He was so successful that when he completed his degree, the University gave him $20,000 to pursue his masters. They even won an award for the project. You can read about it here:
Anyways, they don’t have a satellite club here at the college and the truth is most of the students here are green and inexperienced, so building a satellite might be a little out of the scope for the student body at a school this small.
Turns out this is actually pretty hard.
Now, there is a 3D printing club that operates out of the school, and it’s pretty sweet. The only issue was the fact that the 3D printer was pretty much built when I started last year. I was terrified of stepping into a club where they were hungry for 3D models, only to find out I did that kind of thing for over a decade. After a decade of drafting, the last thing I wanted to do was have someone lean over me shoulder and tell me what they wanted built.
So I talked to some of my friends here at the school, and within about five minutes, we had enough interest from enough people to start up a club. This also means that we’ll be privy to a $400 budget from the school to build you a robot. Can we design a robot that will recognize garbage and pick it up? Will we able to create a swarm of bots that could build a structure? What what will $400 buy us?
Well, not a whole lot. Nothing sophisticated, at least yet. What you can get is some rudimentary components and get some motors and some wheels and make a bot that avoid running into walls. And then we can teach it to make decisions on which way to turn, and how to avoid obstacles. Then we mass produce them, and then arm them with lazers, and march across the planet instilling my plan for a new world order. Under my iron wing, we’ll build a utopia together! My detractors shall be buried under the wheels of my doom machines!
This is the most relevant picture I could find.
Truthfully, we will building something more like this…
But a guy can dream of mechanized world domination, right?
Sincerely,
The Illustrious Mr. Charlton
p.s. Apparently my spelling of lazer is incorrect, but I absolutely refuse to spell it with anything other than a “z”.
p.s.s. To be frank, ruling the world seems like big pain in the ass. It’d be like the old game ‘King of the Castle’, except the little hill you’re playing on is made of garbage and it’s on fire.
p.s.s.s. See, that’s a GREAT idea for a robot. It could put out trash fires. Why am I not in charge of things?
p.s.s.s.s. That’s right, the whole ‘pain in the ass’ thing.
From the Desk of the Illustrious Mr. Charlton 