WAC Highlight: Tyler Zobel
Some people don’t see problems; they see solutions. When his engineering teacher posed the challenge to reverse engineer a donated electric wheelchair, Tyler Zobel’s interest was piqued. The senior at Havelock High School quickly realized the difficult part of Mr. Scarfpin’s project was in the lack of available resources. Even with a recent push in funding for STEM education, many k12 schools in North Carolina still lack the resources to offer students rich learning experiences in programs like robotics. But, where others saw a problem, Tyler looked for affordable solutions. The solutions he came up with could benefit other schools and students, so he decided to write about it.
Mr. Scarfpin’s classroom has seen many inventive robotics students, and it is filled with their inventions along with some other types of technology. An available open-source library sparked Tyler’s interest. “I was looking at some programs that were given to me by the robot operating system”, Tyler explained in a recent interview. “Basically, a lot of them were inefficient for smaller electronics.” Tyler focused on the Raspberry Pi 4, which he describes as “commonly bought and pretty cheap electronic that cannot run a lot of these programs”. Wondering how he could make the Raspberry Pi more efficient, Tyler turned to a common video game console. Leveraging the three-dimensional data provided by a camera in an Xbox Kinect, Tyler built a two-dimensional indoor exploration robot. His robot now autonomously navigates the halls of his high school, delivering packages while effectively avoiding obstacles in real time. After finishing, Tyler decided to write about his experience, but he was less certain of how to navigate the publication process.
Tyler connected with former high school English teacher and current Assistant Director of ECU’s Writing Program’s Kerri Flinchbaugh. “Honestly, I did very little to help get Tyler published,” Dr. Flinchbaugh recently explained. “I provided some resources, and we scheduled some Zoom calls to check in along the way. But Tyler found and communicated with the journal. He reframed the article, making the argument that what he did could be used in other schools whose robotics programs are underfunded. He’s not only brilliant when it comes to math and science; he is rhetorically savvy.”
Reflecting on his writing experience, Tyler said, “It is definitely weird, the way there are so many styles of writing. Chicago, APA, MLA…” After exploring the style of his target journal and with the support of his teachers, Tyler’s article “Preliminary Results of Studying the Effects of the Xbox Kinect on Indoor Autonomous Exploration Robots: A Case Study” was published in Young Scientist Journal, a product of the Vanderbilt Center for Science Outreach and a publication that aims to recognize the achievements of high school scientists like Tyler. In it, he showcases a potential way to reduce costs while advancing robotics education with less expensive and widely available processors was accepted for publication.
When asked what he learned from this project, Tyler exclaimed, “I learned that I can do that on a Raspberry Pi! I was not expecting it to turn out the way it did.” While robots are not usually considered easy to build, it was easier than he expected. “The ability to get it to be that simple makes me think that it’s not too difficult to get a robot in every household. It could be like
computers in the 80s with Steve Jobs. You could probably, one day, have a robot assistant, like a more autonomous Roomba [vacuum], in every household.”
Speaking of the future, one wonders what it holds for a bright student like Tyler. He plans to continue his course of study in college, hopefully graduating with a double major in computer science and something else. He explains, “I go back and forth between a couple of things. Maybe physics or astronomy… But you can put computer science into everything! Like the robot that I put in my high school.”