Franklin Area High School invests in technology for the future | Front Page
Franklin Area High School invests in technology for the future | Front Page
Publish Date: 2026-05-21 21:00:00
Source Domain: www.thederrick.com
A super-sized 3D printer and robotic canine are bringing cutting-edge technology to the students at Franklin Area High School with the goal of exposing them to the future of technology long before they hit the workforce.
The four-legged, gyro-guided robot dog has “lived” at Franklin Area High School since last spring.
Unlike some other robots, the Unitree Go2 Robot Dog didn’t know how to do a lot of things out-of-the-box, but instead needed to be trained so that its artificial intelligence software (AI) could “learn” how to respond to commands and even do things as simple as walk through a doorway.
“A lot of it was learning how prompt creation works for AI,” explained Director of Technology Giancarlo Delmo. “They have to learn how to think like a robot does. It’s sequential … ‘Look at your surroundings, tell me what you see, then do the command.’”
Senior Ayden White, who was president of the Franklin Creators’ Club until recently due to his upcoming graduation, said the robot knew some things, like what a door was, but “it had some issues with the door frame,” he said.
The students had to learn how to turn off the robot’s avoidance sensors, a safety feature to prevent it from running into things, so that it would walk through a doorway.
Or, for commands like “Go up to the person with the orange shirt,” the robot had to be trained to differentiate between an orange shirt and background orange, Delmo said. One student spent an hour making faces at it to teach it emotions, he said.
The goal of buying the dog was to incorporate a new style of robotics into the school, which already had exposed students to robots through VEX and BEST Robotics programs.
“This is different, more futuristic, more complex,” Delmo explained. “This is technology being used today.”
Robot dogs like the school’s are…
