Meet Dallas-area teen Adrian Mayberry. Until recently, he was just a regular kid who liked to tinker with robots. Now, he’s the Duncanville Police Department’s personal repair whiz kid—after he successfully fixed the department’s new search and rescue robot.
The robot, designed to probe situations involving bomb threats or suspicious devices, arrived at the police department already broken. The department tried to get it working on their own, but couldn’t. So, they turned to the local high school’s engineering class. Adrian, a junior at the school, took a special interest in the project.
Writes the Duncanville Independent School District News:
“Adrian says he took the manuals home. It took him a few hours, but he read them cover to cover. Then he started troubleshooting. Turns out the controller–which happens to belong to an Xbox system–wasn’t communicating with the computer. That had to be fixed. The robot was also having trouble turning, so wheels needed to be replaced. Adrian says he checked over every inch of the device to make sure no wires or contacts were loose, and after taking it on some test runs in the hallways at the high school, the robot was ready to be returned to the police department.”
It took about a month, but the teen got the robot working again. And he started training the police department on how to operate the robot. Since the repair, Adrian’s story has been picked up by USA Today, but the tinkering teen has remained humble. It seems like, for him, fixing the robot has been its own reward.
“To get something to work. To take something that’s broken and bring it back to life. That’s what I live for,” Adrian told USA Today.
Sounds like our kind of kid.
Banner image—screenshot from USA Today coverage.
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