Richard Yim, an innovative student at the University of Waterloo, has created a robot designed to defuse landmines.
Yim was a teenager in Cambodia when he realized the dangers posed by landmines in former conflict zones could be mitigated. His aunt died after stepping on a landmine when he was eight years old. The landmine that killed Yim’s aunt was one of the millions of the devices that lie hidden on Cambodia’s war-scarred landscape.
Yim arrived in Canada at the age of 13 and learned that death does not need to result from unexplored ordinates. He decided to study engineering in order to help Cambodia and dozens of other countries to rid their lands of dangerous mines. One of his fourth-year engineering projects at the University of Waterloo morphed into a company that is working to design and build a yet-to-be-named robot to safely defuse landmines.
“It’s something that I want to work on to find a solution so that the kid in the next generation doesn’t have to go through what I have to go through when I was a kid,” said Yim.
For more information on Yim and his company, The Landmine Boys, click here to read a press release from Global News.
Also check out The Landmine Boys website here.
