Unique Robots Helping Mankind
www.servomagazine.com/index.php?/magazine/article/august2011_ThenNow
FIGURE 3.
Drawing of
Voyager 2.
radiation sickness occurs at 1,000 millisieverts exposure. The
Japanese officials doubled their maximum of 125 millisieverts
per hour to 250, but quickly found that their workers could
only handle five hours, and then not have any additional
exposure for a year. This required rotating many hundreds of
workers into and out of the buildings, only to be replaced by
new workers who had to spend way too much time just to
find out what the previous five-hour shift had done. There
had to be a better way.
There was. Send in robots to also do physical work. Prior
to the first entry of mobile, ground-based robots into the
stricken Fukushima Daiichi plant, a US Global Hawk robot
drone plane was used to take crucial video images of the
plant below. This allowed officials to assess the actual
FIGURE 2.
Voyager 6 —
V-Ger from the
Star Trek movie.
damages to the plant without exposing pilots to the
radioactive sky above. The PackBots were designed to
maneuver over battlefield debris to allow military personnel
to analyze the physical situation from a safe location. These
lightweight robots were nimble enough to do the same in the
partially collapsed reactor buildings. Their manipulator arms
were fitted with various end-effectors to allow the operators
to read and adjust instruments and to examine objects found
in the debris. The robots were also fitted with a visible
light/IR camera that delivered the images through a fiber
optic cable to the controlling operator located in a safe,
remote location. These video images allowed repair teams to
map out salvage strategies to assist larger heavy-lifting robots,
as well as for human clean-up crews.
The heavy-duty robots included two iRobot 710
‘Warriors’ and the British-designed Talon, created by the
British defense firm QinetiQ. It was QinetiQ’s American group
that sent these robots to Japan. Like the smaller robots, the
Warriors and Talons were designed to handle IEDs and other
explosives, as well as larger and heavier hazardous materials.
The iRobot 710 can handle a 150 pound payload which
makes it ideal for carrying its smaller 510 ‘cousin’ into a
building and placing it in a location that the smaller robot
cannot reach on its own. The 710 was also fitted with a
special arm and end-effector to allow it to drag a heavy fire
hose to the interior of a building to extinguish a fire or cool
an over-heated reactor. As capable as these robots are, they
cannot move and manipulate objects as well as a human
being, nor can they make on-the-spot observations and
therefore impromptu reactions like a human can. Their value
comes in their ability to work where no human can (or
should) operate.
FIGURE 4. NASA Mars Rover, Opportunity.
FIGURE 5. Spirit
stuck in sand
on Mars.
Voyager Space
Robots Have Lived
for Decades
I was privileged to work on
several space robot designs for
NASA in my years with
Rockwell, but many of the most
unique and capable spaceborne
robotic systems were developed
well before or since my
departure. There are very few
robots that made headlines
many years ago, but then some
of the same robots are still
making headlines decades later.
76 SERVO 08.2011
