LS Laird Scabar

Vancouver, BC

Mechanical & mechatronics engineering @ UBC. I like building cool stuff with cool people.

Currently into robotics, physical ai, mechanical design, and anything that challenges me.

Laird Scabar
Snowboarding
Hiking in the BC mountains
Surfing
School
UBC
Program
Mech. Eng — Mechatronics
Currently
Intern @ VETS
Based in
Vancouver, BC
Toolkit

Technical skills

Certified SolidWorks Professional badge CSWP — Certified SolidWorks Professional Dassault Systèmes · advanced part modelling, configurations, and design changes. View credential
Certified SolidWorks Associate badge CSWA — Certified SolidWorks Associate Dassault Systèmes · part modelling, assemblies, and drawing fundamentals. View credential
Experience

What I've been up to

University of British Columbia
Education

B.A.Sc. Mechanical Engineering

Mechatronics specialization · University of British Columbia

May 2026 — August 2026

Mechanical Engineering Intern

VETS Group

Supporting mechanical engineering work on industrial ventilation, HVAC, and dust collection projects.

Internship
Sept 2025 — May 2026

Drivetrain Engineer

SUBC — UBC Submarine Design Team

Designing and manufacturing the human-powered drivetrain for our competition submarine. Cut gearbox weight in half and eliminated output gear slippage.

Design team
2015 — 2025

Film & Television Actor

Netflix, Disney, CBC, Amazon Prime

A decade of live-action and animated productions, starting at age eight. On pause while I'm at UBC.

On pause
2020 — Present

Terry Fox Run Organizer

Community volunteer lead · Surrey, BC

Coordinating volunteers, sponsors, and route planning for my community's annual run — contributing to over $50,000 raised for cancer research.

Volunteer
Currently working on

Oculus-controlled robotic arm

I model and build the whole arm myself — designed in SolidWorks, every part printed from scratch, no kit involved. I drive it in real time from a VR headset: move your hand, the arm follows.

  • A 5-DOF arm built from scratch in SolidWorks, carrying joint loads on bearings rather than servo output shafts, with two shoulder servos mirrored across a single pivot to share torque
  • Three design iterations of tuning print orientation, press-fit tolerances and fastener access (DFM/DFA) cut part count and build time — it assembles from FDM parts and off-the-shelf hardware using hand tools
  • A WebXR app solves closed-form inverse kinematics at 50 Hz, a Node.js bridge maps joint angles to servo commands, and C++ ESP32 firmware enforces per-joint velocity and acceleration limits over serial/UDP
  • Designing a PCB to replace the breadboard — servo power distribution, ESP32 and signal routing on one board instead of a bundle of jumper wires
  • Next: recording teleop sessions as demonstrations and training a policy on them, so the arm learns tasks from being shown rather than being scripted — the physical AI side is what I'm most interested in
In progressSolidWorks3D printingESP32WebXRC++Node.js
Projects

Things I've built

Each one has its own page with photos, drawings, and a description you can switch between a quick summary and the full technical write-up.

Contact

Let's build something

Want to talk about new ideas, engineering, sports, or literally anything else? I'm always up for it.