Ashland teen to give robotics talk in Rome

This teenager heads to Rome today for vacation, but he will do more than eat gelato.

Joe Peine and his parents are heading to the international BioRob Roma 2012 robotics conference, where the 16-year-old, who just got his driver?s license, will present an academic paper he wrote about robotic surgery.

?I like math and science, it?s exciting to me,? Peine said.

When he wasn?t doing Advanced Placement calculus homework or teaching second-graders how to look at sugar through a microscope, Peine this year developed and ran experiments on a surgical robot his father, Bill, keeps in the basement.

?I was always interested in what my dad did,? said Joe, wearing an MIT T-shirt covered in math equations.

The robot is left over from when his father worked at a company that built the machine.

The clawed robot is built to do minimally invasive surgery, like removing a prostate, Bill Peine said, and reduces the amount of trauma suffered by patients.

Peine, who has a Harvard doctorate degree in engineering, said he kept a few robots when his company went out of business several years ago.

His son?s experiment has to do with backlash, the amount of unwanted motion from the robot while it performs tasks.

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He demonstrated how to move his hands on a pair of joystick-like claws. The robot simultaneously moves its miniature claws nearby.

It can cut in a circle, put hollow blocks onto pegs, sew with a needle and tie thread in a knot.

Joe Peine said his favorite subject in school is calculus. Equations, derivatives and integrals don?t daunt him.

?People use them in real life and it?s really cool,? he said.

School departments across the state are ramping up the amount of science, technology, engineering and math taught at all grade levels in an effort to prepare more students for jobs in those fields, and Peine has been a part of that.

?He was a hit with the students this year,? said his AP chemistry teacher Colleen Sherman of the elementary school science club Peine ran this spring.

Peine said that his hobby would also make an exciting career choice.

?It?d be great as a job to work on robots like this,? he said.

(Laura Krantz can be reached at 508-626-4429 or lkrantz@wickedlocal.com. Follow her on Twitter @laurakrantzmwdn.)

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