Over the years in the robotics club, Albert Xu (12) has solved countless problems and worked on a multitude of different projects, from autonomous cars to robotic arms.

“I joined the robotics club freshman year, but I really got into serious robotics work between sophomore and junior year,” he said. “I did the First Lego League, but that was only one year in third grade. Now, robotics is my life.”

Now, Albert spends most of his free time working on different robotics problems that appeal to him.

“There was one about a honeycomb,” he said. “If you were a bee, and you know the locations of all other bees, so it’s an infinite honeycomb. You have a starting and end location, and you have to solve the optimal path to your destination. I just like that problem, and I’ve been trying to solve it. I haven’t solved it yet. When I’m bored, I just try to figure it out. That’s what I do with my productive free-time.”

Albert paid a visit to his cousin’s robotics laboratory at Stanford University, looking for inspiration for his projects.

“One of the things I was impressed by was that they had an underwater diving robot,” he said.“It was actually a humanoid robot, actually bigger than human size, like a submarine. It just had these arms with hands on them, and they had a very special controller built in so that you can use the controller to control the hands to match your hands. So, if you went to grab something the machine would replicate it, except deep sea underwater. It’s for excavation, looking around in shipwrecks, all that whatnot.”

For Albert, time-commitment is the one of the most challenging aspects of robotics.

“The hardest part of robotics is not dying,” he said. “It’s a lot of work, and it takes a lot of time commitment. It’s long hours of work without sleeping. Something that would take a long time to solve usually takes a few months to figure out. At least for me, I don’t usually dwell on a single problem for an extremely long time.”

Albert takes problems one step at a time, rather than trying to plan everything out in advance.

“I do some planning now and then,” he said. “I try to plan my stuff, but it’s really hard to account for everything. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s just that when I have a problem, I plan it out how I think it should go, and I just find a solution. And if that doesn’t work, then I find another solution. Just keep going until it works.”

Albert’s favorite part of robotics comes from the happiness he feels when he is building something and the pride that comes from finally being able to see the finished product.
“[It’s] looking forward to doing something fun,” he said. “Building things. The best part is the feeling of achievement. It’s like ‘I built something, and it works.’ Just finishing it and making it work, it’s good enough for me. I’ll always look for the next harder thing to do; the next technical something.”