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Rescue robots in the air
Another project under development
for emergencies is taking things a
step further — into the air. These
rescue assistants are specialized
kinds of
drones. Since they are often
as small as a shoebox, they are light
enough to hover in the air. They can
fly about 15 meters up, allowing
them to use their built-in cameras
and infrared systems to scout out
the surroundings to determine where the fire is or where injured people might be.
Drones like this are helpful because they can do things like transmit images of a
burning house directly to the fire department. That lets the emergency personnel
get an overview of the situation without having to send people into harm’s way.
Another contestant did better.
Schaft,
a Japanese
robot, even managed to back down a stair
way
without a handrail. But even he could onl
y do that
very slowly.
And this is how one contestant looks. This is
Atlas,
an American robot weighing 150
kilograms with a rotating cylindrical laser scanner in his face (see “Check it out,” page 76),
which he uses to orient himself in open terrain. In his first octathlon attempts, however, he
was anything but sure-footed. He wobbled, took slow and tiny steps, and proved to be
quite unsure of himself.
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CHECK IT OUT