Easton LaChappelle began building his first robotic arm at the age of 14. His materials? Legos, fishing line, electrical tubing, and motors taken from remote-controlled airplanes. Not only did it work, but it has led to a five-year journey devoted to revolutionizing the way we think, and approach, prosthetics.
As is usually the case, however, the most interesting part of Easton’s story is the “Why?”. Why do this? Why devote the twilight years of his adolescence to the pursuit of a robotic arm? The answers are remarkable, really.
What served as a catalyst for Easton’s first robotic arm was what he saw while at a science fair: a seven-year-old girl with a somewhat-primitive prosthetic arm that costed her family somewhere around $80,000. Soon after, Easton was determined to build and develop an advanced robotic arm for under $1,000, a cost that would greatly impact the industry, as well as the users of prosthetics, veterans included.
And this brilliant young man may have just accomplished that…