Servo - August 2011

Then

d n a

NOW

UNIQUE ROBOTS HELPING MANKIND by Tom Carroll

Robots come in many sizes, shapes, and functional capabilities, and are designed to help mankind in many different ways. It’s easy to see how industrial robots simplify operations and make manufacturing a lot safer for workers, but how about the many other applications most of us never get to see or experience? Surgical robot systems are making once-complicated operations a lot easier to perform — a fact that I have come to realize when I was just diagnosed with prostate cancer and will undergo robotic surgery this September. We’ve seen news clips of the robots that surveyed and assisted in last year’s Gulf oil spill repairs and cleanup, and others that crawl into oil pipelines for inspection. Some of the most unique robots in the world (or should I say in our solar system?), are space robots, and the US now has some spacecraft that are leaving our solar system for deep interstellar space, but I’d like to start with a unique robotic solution here on Earth.

Robots Assist Japan with their Nuclear Plant Disaster

Military robots are assisting our armed forces far away in the Middle East, yet some were adapted to help Japan in a most valuable way. I was watching a news program the other night and one of the field reporters was remarking just how valuable robots have become throughout the world. She was discussing how the robots assisting in the safe inspection and clean-up of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant reactors damaged in the Japanese earthquake were preventing people from getting overdoses of radiation. The US supplied many of the robots used in the massive cleanup of the heavily damaged reactors.

iRobot is known by most people as the supplier of millions of Roomba vacuum cleaner robots for the home. Many others — especially our military personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq — know of the many iRobot military robots being deployed to assist soldiers in the field of battle, especially the mid-sized iRobot PackBots used in multiple ways in the two wars. PackBots are used to defuse IEDs (improvised explosive devices), safely screen people and buildings for explosives, and search high-risk areas such as probable enemy hideouts and even sewers. The PackBot’s versatility comes from its capacity to accommodate a wide range of payloads and sensors — including manipulators — all of which are controlled by iRobot’s Aware 2 intelligence software that allows for modular, mission-specific

configurations. iRobot has delivered over 3,000 PackBots to the military and other civilian groups around the world.

iRobot has modified this series of military robots into non-military hazardous area devices and they have proven useful in operations beyond the battlefield. Radiation has not been a problem encountered in these wars but the basic platforms have this extreme hazardous duty capability designed into them. These 48 to 60 pound remotely-operated PackBot 510 robot vehicles were just what Japanese officials needed to enter the buildings containing the damaged reactors to determine if the radiation level was safe enough for human entry. It wasn’t. Figure 1 shows a PackBot 510 operating in a high radiation area. The US standard for radiation exposure is a maximum of 50 millisieverts a year;