Meet EDI the 3D Printable Rubber Band Shooting Mech Warrior
Meet EDI the 3D Printable Rubber Band Shooting Mech Warrior
It isn’t even remotely a hyperbolic statement to suggest that our future will be entirely defined by robotics. Science fiction may have filled an entire generation’s heads with visions of stark futures where our robotic servants (inexplicably using bodies like ours) do everything for us while we quickly become irrelevant. But the reality is that robots have already become virtually irreplaceable to modern society. Our robots don’t have shiny white, human-shaped heads, but the cars that drive or park themselves are robots, most manufacturing is done by robotics, and depending on how loosely we stretch the definition several of our home appliances would qualify as robots. And of course 3D printers are most certainly robots, albeit simple ones.
The big thing that most of our literary dystopian futures get wrong is the idea that robots will eventually replace the need for people. But the reality is that once robotics simplify or eliminate a human job, it just requires a different type of job to be filled somewhere else. We will always, at least for the far foreseeable future, require a human workforce of some kind. Not only are there some jobs that robots simply cannot do, but someone is going to have to design and repair the robots that we build. Thankfully, and thanks in part to an enthusiastic maker movement, schools and educators are finally starting to understand the important role STEAM and robotics education have in our coming generations’ lives.
The growing movement to bring technical education to students at younger ages has opened the door for a wide variety of new businesses that create high-tech learning projects designed to appeal to a wide range of students. Naturally, 3D printers and simple robot projects tend to be a recurring theme in many of these projects for obvious reasons. As an intern at EZ-Robot, University of Waterloo Mechatronics Engineering student James Graham-Hu had a wide range of robotic components and materials available to him when a coworker suggested building a walking robot with a rubber band gun. You know, just because.
Read more at 3DPrint.com
