My motivation for sharing and doing robotics is to fulfill a childhood dream.

The seed for this dream was planted by my parents whom I vividly remember gifting me the book “Robot Builder” by John Baichtal when I was a child. Many hours was spent looking over all the bright color pictures and reading and re-reading the instructions.

Of course, I didn’t have the facilities that I do now at the University of Alberta (like the Elko Engineering Garage) but regardless, at 12 years old, I bought some breadboards, LEDs, and resistors and set up shop in my parents’ basement wet bar that was unused.

This “hobby” of robotics and electronics would grow over the years as I added more capacitors, potentiometers, photoresistors, 555 timer ICs, Arduino, and even a raspberry pi to the wet bar “workshop”.

Enter into the electrical engineering program at the University of Alberta, now equipped with the facilities, peers, and direction, I have taken the next step and am trying to build robots end-to-end: all the way from the hardware and structure to the software.

Now why I like robots is three fold. The first reason is that making robots is fun. The second reason is that robots (and the modern AI like LLMs) can allows humans to augment their abilities and achieve more than they could ever and experience the world in a completely new way. I also believe that robots have a tremendous capability for good and can lift humanity to new heights. For example, robots do not experience fatigue or nerves and can assist surgeons in performing complex life saving surgery where millimeter precision is required. The final reason, that has become more apparent to me at my time at the University of Alberta, is that there is a hidden art to robotics.

Allow me to elaborate on that. Beyond the calculations, procedures and handbooks that make up engineering, there is an element of elegance that must be put into a robot to not only have it meets its requirement within its constraints but have it solve a problem with great simplicity.

Whilst one shouldn’t chase this elegance directly as it is the by-product of clever engineering, I have to admit that the “wow” of this engineering has drawn me in.

Now, I could talk about AI and how I had experience the uncanniness of the OpenAI Playground in 2021 typing back at me or spending hours wrangling CUDA and pip packages, but I feel that this “About” section is turning into a “Autobiography” section.

So join me on this journey and let’s learn and build together.