"You watch 'Transformers', 'I wish I could have Bumblebee in real life.'" "I always wanted my own personal robot," he tells CNBC Make It. In Lagos, he spent a lot of time hanging out with neighbors who worked fixing radios and other electronics for a living, learning the basics of using tools to fix and build electronic devices. Growing up, his father was a chemistry teacher and his mother was a medical nurse, so he says he was always surrounded by science. Called MekaMon, Reach Robotics describes its product as a "battlebot" that uses augmented reality technology to allow gamers and robotics enthusiasts alike to play around with the device in both the real and virtual world.Īdekunle has been playing with robots for most of his life. Now armed with a Bachelor's degree in robotics from the University of the West of England, Adekunle is focused on a much more advanced robotic creation. That very rudimentary robot actually "worked quite well," Adekunle says - or, at least "as much as a motor with two batteries stuck to it could work." "And it would kind of buzz around and kind of shake around, and I would add little steering legs to it, to get it to move in a certain direction. This first robot "was basically this motor with two batteries stuck to the side," Adekunle says. He was only about 9 years old, still living in his hometown of Lagos, Nigeria.
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Adekunle still remembers the first time he built his own robot, "if you could even call it a robot," he tells CNBC Make It.