The future of the robotics industry is in good hands. Meet 10-year-old Michael Wimmer, a robotics prodigy who lives just outside Charlotte, North Carolina. We caught up with Wimmer at the Robotics Summit & Expo 2019
If you don’t know Wimmer, the video above offers a chance to learn a little about him. What an impressive young man. He’s been a member of Mensa since he was four years old, and he’s going into his junior year of high school.
Not exactly what I was doing when I was 10.
Wimmer taught himself most all of his programming and robotic knowledge through trial and error and online videos. Some of his work includes building a machine learning model that could detect various toy cars. As you can see in the video below, Wimmer increased the difficulty of the challenge by testing the machine learning model only on red cars while he was wearing a red shirt. The video has been viewed nearly 170,000 times on Wimmer’s LinkedIn page, which is run by his parents.
He also developed a semi-autonomous RC Corvette using a Raspberry Pi 3 and Python coding. The car includes three modes: manual drive mode, lane keep mode and front crash avoidance mode. Wimmer said he did all the coding, from the driving and steering to sensor input and output responses. His next modification to the car will be a front camera for real-time machine learning. Check it out:
Wimmer runs his own company called Next Era Innovations. And he created a slew of apps for the popular NAO Robot, including the NAO Microphone and NAO Health Companion.
Of course, Wimmer has other hobbies besides robotics, including a passion for auto racing. For more about Wimmer, here’s a great profile by the Salisbury Post of Wimmer from November 2018. For all the robotics companies out there struggling to find employees, keep an eye on Wimmer.
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