Students at Sudbury’s Lasalle Secondary School have been busy building a robot -- the first of its kind in northern Ontario.
The InMoov technology, fondly named ‘Lance’ after the school’s Lancer home team, can respond to verbal commands, answer questions and interact with people.
It was more than two years ago when students were learning online due to the pandemic.
Roger Branconnier, a robotics teacher at the school, said he wanted to come up with a way to get students engaged while they were learning from home.
Branconnier said the learning curve was steep and it took time for him to understand how to build the parts using 3D printing.
“I basically started off with building a little finger, just a little finger that moved back and forth, and I was showing the students online,” he explained.
“Through the camera: ‘see, this is something we can do online through 3D printing’ and then the finger became a hand, the hand became a shoulder and so on.”
It took hundreds of hours of 3D printing to make more than 400 printed 3D parts.
Once classes switched back to in-person learning, the project continued to involve students. Now, they are working on building the left arm, but there is an opportunity to add to the project.
“We could put cameras in the eyes for facial recognition. We could even build gloves that could mimic what the robot does,” Branconnier said.
Matthew King, a Grade 12 student at Lasalle, said he is looking to pursue a career in mechanical engineering one day.
He said he’s grateful to experience something so unique.
“I don’t think many students get an opportunity to work on something like this, so the fact that I’ve been lucky to be here at Lasalle and work on something as cool as that or even our smaller robots in the club, it’s been a really cool experience,” King said.
Students in the Robotics Club are gearing up for a provincial competition in May. Called the Skills Ontario Competition, student programming and engineering skills will be put to the test by building three robots.
The challenge was cancelled last year due to the pandemic and students said they are looking forward to the competition.
