By As Walter Martinez walked into his empty lab on campus, in the corner of the room sat one of his favorite robots: an all red, multi-blade, 120-pound battle robot known as Stingray.
“We named this one Stingray because were very close to the beach, and this one has a very low profile, like a stingray,” Martinez said.
The Cal State Long Beach robotics professor first arrived at CSULB as a student in 1994. He graduated with a degree in computer engineering technology and returned to campus in 2001 as a professor.
Martinez said his passion for robotics, however, stretches beyond his teachings at CSULB. With his robots, Martinez has competed on multiple television shows, such as “Robotica” on The Learning Channel and TNN’s “Robot Wars.”
Martinez entered his CSULB team, Dream Droid, into the television show “Battlebots IQ” in 2004. He entered three robots in the five-day competition and won against Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Florida.
“I remember MIT having all these big screens near their booth… and here we are with our [CSULB] T-shirts, you know just being humble,” Martinez said. “We go to the ring, and we beat them.”
Born and raised in Honduras, Martinez said he fell in love with robots at age 7, when he saw “Star Wars.”
“I saw the robots and said, ‘that is exactly what I want to do with my life,’” he said.
Coming from one of the poorest countries in Central America, Martinez said that in order to build robots, he often used old parts discarded by a local television station in his neighborhood.
“I was also hired by some of the rich kids in other private schools to build robots for them for their science fairs, and they would also win first place,” he said.
Martinez graduated from high school in Honduras and then came to the U.S. to study engineering. When he started his first semester at El Camino College, he said he found himself lost in translation.
“I had to basically learn English from scratch,” Martinez said. “I had to repeat every single class from my first semester, because I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t understand.”
CSULB alumnus Glen Valley, a past student of Martinez’s, said Martinez made robotics fun and interesting by using Legos for demonstrations.
“He’s [Martinez] definitely one of the best professors I’ve had,” Valley said. “I work for a rocket company, and I’m not sure if I’d be here without him.”
Martinez said trying to encourage kids to stay in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields is most important to him.
“The best contribution I can do is motivate people from a young age and teach them how this works, ” he said. “They are the next generation.”
