St. Clair is the first college in North America to bring in a humanoid robot that can walk, talk, and dance into the classroom. The robot was giving fist bumps Thursday as it roamed around the college. “That is so awesome,” said one onlooker. The R1 robot is a head turner. “I find it fascinating. It’s like Star Wars. The technology nowadays is amazing,” said another onlooker. The Unitree R1 Humanoid stands 4-feet tall, and weighs 29 kilograms “I’m that generation where I grew up, we didn’t even have internet. Now we have mobile phones. This is just the next iteration,” said Dr. Karamjeet Dhillon, the director of Research and Innovation at St. Clair College. The robot comes in at a cost of $26,000 and was funded through a federal research grant. “We’re hoping that our students can work with this humanoid and be able to use what they’ve learned to be able to speak in natural language and be able to communicate with it. Even be able to interact in different ways,” said John Ulakovich, professor and coordinator of the data analytics program. The robot was delivered to the research and innovation department this week. There are preset movements that can be manipulated but… “We’re going to bypass this and start programming our own movements and that’s where the key is for programming and students are going to help evolve, create that AI and large language model,” said John Lopez, program manager of Research and Innovation. Students may be able to teach the robot to push the elevator button and travel to a different floor or drive screws into parts. The robot’s agent, or brain, is loaded with data inputted by faculty members. The thought is the robot may eventually respond and develop its own way of interacting. “It’s very safe as well,” Ulakovich told CTV News. “What we do is isolated to the information that we want it to learn and use. It’s not out on the network or the Wi-Fi trying to bring information in from who knows where.” Industry partners visited the college earlier this week to get a peak at a humanoid that could evolve into something useful for their businesses in the future. “The humanoid can be programmed and work efficiently, nonstop, but also then you need the programmers so it’s still going to create jobs in the environment but mostly on robotics and the algorithms, building programming on that side of things,” said Lopez. Ulakovich feels robots could be useful in the near future, “I think in some day that maybe five, 10 years from now, maybe even sooner these humanoid robots could be around helping in many different industries, and education could be one as well.”
