Tag: robots

Categories
voluntary cooperation

The Day Cillian Took Control

chair, robotics

One of the things that made 2019 a decent year was the robotics team at Farmington High School in Minnesota.

A former student at the school, Tyler Jackson, contacted the team to ask if they could help his son, two-year-old Cillian, become more mobile. He had been born with a condition resembling cerebral palsy that makes it hard to move around.

The Jackson family couldn’t afford the kind of power wheelchair Cillian needed.

The Farmington kids were eager to help. They replaced the electrical innards of a Fisher Price riding toy, added a bicycle seat, and used a 3D printer to design a joystick and other components.

The team applied skills gained by building robots for competitions, and they also got technical help from the University of Delaware, which had a program for designing mobility devices for disabled kids.

A local broadcast story about the wheelchair shows Cillian in action.

He isn’t the only child who has benefitted from the team’s tech prowess.

Early in 2021, the Rogue Robotics team at Farmington posted an appeal on their Facebook page after learning that Fisher Price had “discontinued the Power Wheels model Wild Thing we convert into wheelchairs for little kids” who either don’t fit into standard powered wheelchairs or can’t afford them.

They asked that anyone who happens to have a Wild Thing model in good condition consider donating it.

This kind of innovation can now be rolled out — pun intended? — broadly, not so much as mass production but as home and community and fix-it shop projects, with 3D printing tech aiding in the revolution.

Now that’s Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Categories
crime and punishment too much government

Red Light Robots

Since we constantly battle against bad government — it being necessary to pare government down to its essential kernel, where it protects rather than tramples our rights — we sometimes lose sight of the fact that good government is both possible and necessary.

Now, many folks will raise an eyebrow, here. “‘Good government’ isn’t just about protecting our rights,” they might say. “It’s about providing key services. Like roads. Traffic lights. That sort of thing.”

Sure, we need roads. And safety measures. Nevertheless, good government is not about overkill.

Take automated intersection policing. That is, the infamous “red-light cameras.”

The New York Post reports that one camera — one intersection robot (better term, eh?) — snapped 1551 infractions on July 7. That was $77,550 for one camera for one day. No wonder that one city councilman likes it. And says it makes roadways safer.

But over at Reason, Zenon Evans marshals some skepticism. “A British study on speed cameras last year determined that ‘the number of collisions appears to have risen enough to make the cameras worthy of investigation in case they have contributed to the increases.’” These dangerous effects don’t appear to be limited to the other side of the pond, either: “[M]any reports,” Evans concludes, “have indicated that red light cameras in the U.S. increase accidents.”

More policing isn’t necessarily better policing. The old rule about traffic safety is that the rules should be set to what most people would drive without the rules.

Let’s remember: rewarding ineffective, counter-productive policing with lots of money is a bad way to govern the governors.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
video

Video: Warrior Robots Today and Tomorrow

Let’s put some context to Rand Paul’s concerns about checks and balances vis-a-vis drone strikes. Robots have entered the battlefield. And are about to buzz and boom big time. The future — even the present — is science-fictional.