Vancouver 24 hrs has named Alannah Yip as one of their “Top 24 Under 24”.

“Just turned 20, Alannah Yip shows off the drive train for her robotics team’s upcoming project — a human-sized home-assistant robot on wheels.  At this early phase, it’s little more than a motorized box, but Yip and the University of B.C. Thunderbots@Home team she captains have designed powerful arms that use simple shapes to calculate their movements.

“We’re designing this robot from scratch,” she boasted. “Building it by ourselves with no professor’s help.”

Her hope with this extracurricular hobby is not simply to invent a helpful tool, but to study how humans and robots might one day relate.”