An 18 year-old Oxford-bound student has built an 80 robot named ‘Wilson’ to help a young blind boy negotiate the halls of his new school. Despite the high-tech nature of the project — the robot uses a grid of lasers to scan the floor for obstacles — the entire project ends up being much cheaper than training a seeing-eye dog.
It sounds as if this is more of a ‘well done’ to the graduating inventor (and that the robot might not get much actual use), but it is still more welcoming than the traditional introduction to secondary school for disabled children, which involves hounding them mercilessly until they cry. Hooray for bucking that trend.
