Canada is a large land mass with a small population, which from the 1960s forward has been approximately 10% of the population of our neighbour the USA. We have long been used to living in the shadow of this giant, so when it came to the multibillion-dollar US space program, it seemed that Canada could only watch from the sidelines.
In fact, when NASA first issued the call for “a tool to function flawlessly in space with the dexterity of a human arm” for their new Space Shuttle program, the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) didn’t even exist. But this big little country answered NASA’s call, and thus began a long and rich history of Canadian excellence in robotics – and it is no surprise that the University of Toronto was there from the beginning.