The Vision...



This picture was actually taken in Iraq in 2004 - couldn't find one from Kosovo in 2001.

Ten years ago (in 2001) I was a United States Army infantry soldier on a peace-keeping mission in Kosovo.  Every day and night, among our many other duties, we conducted presence patrols through the streets of Kosovo as a show of force to deter violence and maintain peace between the Albanians and Serbians.  We returned from our night missions and racked out on our cots for a few hours before we got up and did the whole thing again.  One day I woke with the vision that I would someday create a company called Rainbow Robotics.

That was my vision.  I didn't know what product or service the company would provide; and at that time, I didn't really know much at all about robotics.  Up to that point, I had completed one year of college as a Computer Science major at the West Virginia Institute of Technology.  I dropped out of college after my first year and joined the U.S. Army in order to earn money (Montgomery G.I. Bill) to finance the remainder of my college education.


This is me the year I saw my first movie in a theater - THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK!


I was born in 1977 and like most kids of the 80's, I was a big STAR WARS fan.  I was fascinated by robots and droids like R2-D2 and C-3PO.  As a kid, I was curious about how things worked, so I took apart all of my toys to see what was inside.  I didn't really have any good resources back in those days from which to learn about robots.  The internet didn't yet exist (as it does today), libraries didn't carry good books on the subject, and I didn't really know anyone who knew anything about robots.

When I was about 11 years old, my mother bought me my first computer - a Packard Bell.  It had a Microsoft Disk Operating System (MS-DOS) and was excrutiatingly slow!  Having never been exposed to computers before, I knew nothing about them or how to use one.  So, at 11 years old, I sat down with the MS-DOS user's manual and read it from cover to cover (understanding very little of what I read).  I did stumble onto a program called Qbasic.exe and a couple of games that were written with it: Nibble.bas and Gorilla.bas.  I monkeyed around (pun intended) with some of the code and was able to change some of the graphics a little, but I didn't really know what I was doing.  It wasn't until years later that I would get my first taste of computer programming.

During the summer of 1994 (between my Sophomore and Junior years of high school), I received a phone call from the Wyoming County Board of Education.  I was selected as the alternate candidate to represent my county at two summer camps: the Governor's School for Science & Mathematics and the Mountaineer Youth Science Camp.  Their first pick had declined the offer, so I was given the opportunity.  I packed my bags and began my journey to becoming an Electrical Engineer.  That summer changed my life forever!  At the GSSM (held at WVU), I was re-acquainted with Qbasic and taught how to use it by a Russian gentleman named Oleg.  He first showed me a couple very simple programs which produced random circles and rectangles of random sizes and colors at random locations on the screen in an infinite loop.  I was amazed and instantly hooked!  I spent countless hours writing programs to model mathematical functions and some that played music which had to be programmed note by note with different frequencies, durations, and pauses.  At the MYSC (held at a 4-H camp), I met counselors Ken and Tracey Anderson who introduced me to microprocessor-based robots - programmable by computer.

For the remainder of my high school years, I spent all of my free time writing computer programs.  Those programs tremendously enhanced my understanding of mathematics.  I recall three of my programs in particular.  One of them created a series of lines that bounced around the screen like the old Windows screen saver.  Another one spun a three-dimensional wire-frame cube around in 3D using trigonometric functions sine and cosine (something that I figured out all by myself).  And my favorite program morphed the Warner Bros. emblem into the Batman symbol just like in the beginning of Batman II.  I took a dozen or more sheets of graph paper, taped them together, drew both outlines, assigned 300 points along the perimeter of each outline, and tediously wrote down the (x,y) coordinates of all 300 points on each outline.  Then I created two 300-element arrays and plotted the points.  I wrote an algorithm that would measure the distance between corresponding points on each outline and through an iterative loop would move the points of one outline toward the points of the other outline so that one image appeared to morph into the other.


This is the least nerdy of my high school senior pictures from 1996.

During my Senior year of high school ('95/'96), one of my teachers asked me where I planned to go to college.  I hadn't a clue - never gave it much thought.  She suggested the West Virginia Institute of Technology, so that's where I applied (and no where else).  That year I took 7 AP (advanced placement) classes and Wood Shop just for fun.  Because of my high school GPA and ACT scores, I was awarded a NASA scholarship and the Leonard C. Nelson College of Engineering scholarship.  Selection of a major field of study was a no-brainer: Computer Science.  I took two semesters of C++ Programming and was the top student in my class.

The following summer, I did a co-op at Virginia Power in Richmond, Virginia.  After a year hiatus to seek direction in my "Christian walk", I went back to college only to realize that I didn't have the money to continue - my scholarships were only good for one year, and this was before the Promise Scholarships.  So I joined the United States Army, starting out as an Infantry TOW missile specialist in Hohenfels, Germany.

During my Army years, I re-evaluated my goals.  I still wanted to do something in the robotics field.  I understood from the beginning that "robotics" is the combination of three separate disciplines: software (computer programming), hardware (electronics), and mechanics (motors, gears, etc.).  The software controls the hardware, and the hardware controls the mechanics.  I realized that it would be unrealistic to obtain degrees in all three disciplines; so in order to become proficient in all three, I would put myself in the middle (hardware - electronics) - making it easiest to branch out to the other two.  So when I got out of the Army in August 2002 and went back to college, I changed my major to Electrical Engineering.

I'll continue this another day...

NOTE: This blog will chronicle my progress in starting my company: Rainbow Robotics.