Camille Beatty

Some time ago, at the age of 11, Camille developed the surprising habit of disassembling everything that crossed her path: toys, watches, remote controls… If it moved or ignited, then he was going to disassemble it. Of course the intention was to reassemble the device, but sometimes I didn’t.

All his life, mechanical and electrical things have seemed to work magically. But at one point he began to think that there had to be something beneath the surface of metal and plastic. And he decided to investigate. He would go to his father with a mass of pieces in his hands and start shooting at him the questions: What are these lights? And these little dots? And that green thing? He didn’t know how to answer it, but thanks to the internet, he learned that the lights were LEDs, that the dots were capacitors and the green ones, motherboards.

One day, his father told him, “You know, instead of taking things apart, we could build something.” He shouted back, “I want to build a robot!” He was surprised by his answer and told him that he would have to learn a lot, but they decided to try. They thought it would take a few months, years perhaps. they listened to blogs about electronics, watched videos on YouTube to learn how to solder, studied the steps to find out what tools they needed and how they should be used. The information was there, one just needed to open one’s mind to it.

Her little sister joined them right away, and after several weeks, they had their first robot. A replica of another one they had seen in Star Wars. As soon as they finished the robot, she and her sister wanted to start the next one. They went to electronics stores near where they lived, bought components online and took advantage of pieces of old gadgets they found. The more they learned, the more they wanted. They built all kinds of robots: robots that rolled, crawled, or flew.

The garage was converted for all practical purposes into a robotics workshop, replete with band saws, hydraulic drills and other machines. They went so far as to build their own CNC milling machine to make their own parts.

They were so enthusiastic and built so quickly that it was difficult for them to keep family and friends up to date with what they were doing in the workshop. So they decided to create a technology blog. That’s how Videorobotics was born. The Videorobotics website quickly became very popular within the Maker movement, the network of amateur tinkerers, inventors like them who tinkered with robots in their garages all over the world. It was a hobby, until one day they were called by the New York Hall of Science.

The New York Hall of Science is an interactive science museum in New York City. They saw Camille and her family’s projects on the web, and asked them to make them a perfectly functional replica of the Mars Rover so that they could use it in their permanent exhibition in outer space.

As they began to work on it, they knew they were facing a new challenge. It was not a robot for its own use, it had to be an easy-to-use, robust and reliable robot. And that’s what they did. His Mars Rover runs from the time the museum opens in the morning until it closes in the afternoon without a break. The Museum told them that it is one of the most popular exhibitions.

The project attracted a lot of attention, they received a letter from the director of NASA praising them, and dozens of magazine articles were written about them. She and her sister are on Fox News and Good Morning America. They received emails asking them to give talks and make robots for them for different purposes.

They built a set of robots for the National Space Museum in Prague, Czech Republic, and another set of robots for the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur. Soon they had a company up and running that built robots for museums all over the world. They thought they had it all. Then came a call from Washington DC: President Obama invited her and her sister to show the robots at the White House, where they met people of different profiles, and high positions, from the Commander of the Navy to the director of the National Science Foundation. They saw the President of the United States give a speech before the entire country in which he mentioned them as examples of entrepreneurship, he even repeated a phrase from Camille’s website: A job for the summer? Who needs to deliver newspapers when you can start a robotics company?

Looking back, he can’t help but think that just a few years ago, when he was only 11 years old, he was taking apart the TV controls on the floor of his room. Now, as it grows and looks forward to the future of the world we live in, I have come to the following conclusion: “The vast amount of readily available knowledge that the internet holds has changed the environment for inventors. My case is not isolated. There are makers like me all over the world. The future of robotics and technology and national economies will certainly be motivated by governments and the big universities and companies that dominate the world, but it will also emerge from individuals and creative teams who set up something in the garage, build for the sake of building, motivated by the unquenchable thirst to learn and to be able to do something alone.”

For every routine, repetitive job lost to AI and automation, a new job of the new millennium can emerge from a maker’s shop.