‘Countless opportunities’: Nanan Academy hosts STEM showcase at Sask. Science Centre

Nanan Academy hosted the STEM showcase at the Saskatchewan Science Centre on Saturday, a chance for students to show off their projects in robotics, 3D design, and video game creation. (Damian Smith / CTV News)

A showcase featuring Saskatchewan talent in STEM – science, technology, engineering, and mathematics – was held at the science centre on Saturday.

Nanan Academy hosted the event, “Ideas to Impact,” which allowed students to show off their homemade projects in robotics, 3D design, and video game creation.

About 25 students participated, including Favour Oduwole, a third-year computer engineering technology student at Saskatchewan Polytechnic, who showed off his capstone project.

In his final semester, he built a six-legged robot, also known as a “hexapod”, and used Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2) to put it into operation.

“It’s [ROS 2] an open source, flexible framework that was created to aid robotic developers create all robot systems that are complex but still cohesive and work together in a much simpler way,” he said.

His project is called “ArachnodeEdu,” which took about five months to create.

“I was always fascinated by robots, not just because of their complexity, but their capabilities,” he said. “When I see all these videos of how robotics are being used in the industry and the multiple and countless sectors like automation, you might see like robotic arms in factories that have sorting and that pipeline type stuff or, robot delivery or even agriculture.”

“To me, robots have countless opportunities for people to apply creative thinking and solutions to.”

To control the robot, he uses a PS5 controller through Bluetooth, hooked up to a minicomputer called Raspberry Pi Five.

• Download the CTV News app to get breaking news alerts sent to your device

“That [Raspberry Pi Five] kind of handles all the computing and all the processing and all the math and equations that just need to be solved in order to move the robot,” he said. “It just solves for the angles, for each motor and sends it to the servo controller board, which is also known as positive modulation.”

To show where the robot needs to go, he uses trigonometry.

“This trajectory is actually just a combination of two curves,” he said. “The curved line is when the robot lifts its leg up and is actually preparing itself to drag itself backwards. So, it lifts this leg up, it makes contact with the ground again and then drags itself in a straight line.”

Oduwole uses inverse kinematics to calculate how to get each joint into a position where you feed a point into an equation.

He also uses a geometric approach, breaking down a robot’s 3D structure into 2D planar drawings, solving each angle using cosine law.

In total, he says around 10 nodes were used on the hexapod. A node is a connection point within a system, acting as a knot where data connects.

“What that allows me to do is that I’m able to just spin up these nodes that communicate to each other, through a channel, also known as a topic,” he said. “The neat thing about ROS 2 is that nodes don’t just have to be point to point, as in node to node, nodes can actually be one to many.”

Oduwole says he’s collaborating with Nanan Academy to introduce ROS 2 to future talent and said companies like Boston Dynamics use ROS 2 to break up part of the robot system.

He said he hopes that ArachnodeEdu can be proof of what can happen in a short amount of time.

“I’m hoping that by building this right now, its purpose is just proof of concept,” he said. “As a student with no prior background or just four or five months ago, I didn’t even know what ROS 2 was. I’m hoping that as I relay this information, it maybe guides on how to use ROS 2, students can then create their own robots for those fields like automation and agriculture.”