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A Robotics Team Built a Toddler a Wheelchair. Now He’s Chasing His Corgis Around.

Cillian Jackson with the Rogue Robotics team at Farmington High School in Minnesota, which built him a motorized vehicle.Credit...Sally McConnaughey, Farmington Area Public Schools

It took Rogue Robotics to get Cillian Jackson his wheels.

At an age when most children are careening across the living room, 2-year-old Cillian was stuck, held back by a genetic condition that delays his physical and cognitive development and a Catch-22 requirement from his family’s insurance provider.

Then a tip from Cillian’s physical therapist led his parents, Krissy and Tyler Jackson, who live in Farmington, Minn., to a website that provided a model for retrofitting toy cars to give mobility to children with disabilities.

Mr. Jackson contacted the robotics team at Farmington High School, and the students took up the challenge.

In less than a month, Cillian was on the move.

The story touched a chord, and a report by a Minnesota television station, KARE-TV, was picked up by news outlets across the country, replaying a video of Cillian demonstrating his skills to beaming students on the robotics team, Rogue Robotics, during a return visit last week.

What seemed like an intractable problem for the family was ultimately solved by a combination of customized technology and teenage enthusiasm.

“Those kids are so smart and so compassionate,” Ms. Jackson said. “They were so thrilled to see that the work that they had done made a difference.”

The Jacksons had faced a quandary. Their insurance and state medical assistance would pay for an electric wheelchair.

But there was a catch.

Cillian would have to show that he had mastered the self-control to maneuver the bulky mechanism. But children learn by doing, as anyone who has watched a toddler endlessly repeat the same action knows. Cillian did not have that option.

The robotics team provided Cillian with his battery-powered vehicle just before Christmas, and since then, Ms. Jackson said, “he is definitely more curious.” The family has two Corgis, and a giggling Cillian likes to chase them in his motorized chair and watch them jump out of the way.

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Members of the Rogue Robotics team working on the chair.Credit...JC Loza/Rogue Robotics Farmington

“It’s him kind of gaining control,” added Ms. Jackson, who works in college administration. “It’s something that he doesn’t have the option to do otherwise.”

At Farmington High School, which Mr. Jackson, a software engineer, attended, the robotics team is part of a league that competes statewide to build a 125-pound robot every year.

Building the lightweight device for Cillian with a modified seat and controls, along with a harness, gave the students a new sense of purpose.

“Robotics is great for teaching,” said Brandon Herrera, a 17-year-old junior who is a programmer on the team. “It doesn’t really show you a whole lot about what is going on and what you can do after robotics.”

“It’s not all about winning,” he added.

The Rogue Robotics team used a design developed by GoBabyGo!, a research team at the University of Delaware that shares its findings to allow other universities and schools to build their own made-to-measure mobility tools.

The Jacksons told the robotics team about the university’s research, according to its coach, Spencer Elvebak, and the students redirected the skills they had honed in competition to retool a Power Wheels chair for Cillian.

“It looked right in our wheelhouse,” Mr. Elvebak said.

Cole Galloway, a professor in the department of physical therapy at the University of Delaware, first conceived of modifying off-the-shelf toy cars more than a decade ago.

Since then, 7,000 to 8,000 cars have been built across the world using his team’s design and engineering, he estimated. “It has been a crazy crowdsourcing,” he said. “We call it a movement. We kind of consider ourselves mobility activists.”

Dr. Galloway’s goal is to reach 30,000 children in the United States with the modified cars, he said. “Most of these kids have never moved on their own,” he said. “The World Health Organization and the United Nations consider mobility and play for kids a human right. We take that very seriously.”

How would it be possible to reach so many additional families? The University of Delaware team says it will soon share a curriculum for schools that is meant to spread the research to younger students interested in science and technology.

“If a robotics club can outperform the medical industry, that could send a shock,” Dr. Galloway said.

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