Stairs are something most people never have to think twice about. But for someone with limited mobility, or someone who simply cannot see what is ahead of them, a staircase can be a real barrier.
That was the problem my co-researcher Audrey Shaleen G. Garcia and I wanted to address. The result was PinkSonic, a remote-controlled robot that can climb stairs and sense its surroundings.
We wanted to build something that could go where standard robots cannot, using parts affordable enough that the concept could actually be taken further. The robot reads how close it is to any obstacle in its path and signals back through colored lights and sound. Green means clear, yellow means something is near, and red means it is very close. A joystick controller handles all the movement, and the whole system communicates wirelessly between the controller and the robot.
Distance sensing worked flawlessly across every test we ran. Stair climbing landed at an 80% success rate, and the two failures pointed us clearly toward what needed to be improved next.
It was not a perfect machine. But it was a working one, built for under three thousand pesos, and it proved that the idea was worth pursuing.