Robytes
by Jeff and Jenn Eckert
Taking The Fun Out Of Drowning
Lifeguards vs. Emily:
A tough choice?
What do these two
photos have in
common? Well, mostly,
they depict red, bulging
subjects from whom
you will never receive
mouth-to-mouth.
However, only one of
them shows a real lifeguard. The homely one — dubbed
Emily (Emergency Integrated Lifesaving Lanyard) by its
creator, Hydronalix ( www.hydronalix.com) — is a remote-controlled watercraft that can skip out to a distressed
swimmer at speeds up to 40 mph and drag him/her back
to shore. Originally designed to enable NOAA staff to
perform health checks on marine animals, it also carries a
sonar device that allows it to scan for subsurface
movements such as, oh, flailing around while drowning. In
addition, Emily has a speaker system that allows
the controlling human to bark instructions to the
victim. Her measurements are 54 x 16 x 8 inches;
she weighs in at 25 lb ( 11. 3 kg); and, according
to Hydronalix, Emily can travel up to 80 miles on a
charge. At patrol speed ( 5 mph), she can operate
continuously for a bit more than an eight-hour
shift. Next year, a fully autonomous version is
planned, to be priced at a mere $3,500. Suddenly
the job security picture for lifeguards doesn’t look
very positive.
“Yes, it is a bin on wheels — there’s the drawer in which
you place your bag of rubbish or recycling — but there’s
a lot more to the robot than that.” Indeed, as it has been
fitted with cameras so it can see where it’s going and
avoid obstacles like broken-down Fiats and opera tenors,
and it uses Wi-Fi triangulation to find its way around inside
your home. However, these things are basically just
wastebaskets mounted on a Segway, so it seems like you
might need quite a few of them for anything larger than a
tiny village.
In a two month test in Peccioli, Italy, two DustCarts
managed to take care of about 100 households. This means
that it would take about 25,500 of them to service Los
Angeles. If you think traffic is bad now, just wait until these
things get out on the Santa Monica freeway.
Curiosity On Wheels
As widely reported, Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity
are still on duty. The former is currently stuck in the sand
and sleeping on the job, but the latter is still plodding along
on its journey to the Endeavor Crater. It’s all very
interesting, but given that they are six years into a planned
90-day mission, it may
be a good time to
think about the next
generation: Curiosity.
DustCart, the
European Union’s
robotic trashman.
Wi-Fi Enabled Trashbot
Also, thankfully, funded by European Union
cash is a $3.9 million research program aimed at
developing autonomous bots — called “DustCarts”
— which are intended to go door to door and
collect trash. According to Dr. Paolo Dario,
coordinator of the Tuscany-based project and
professor of biomedical robotics at the Scuola
Superiore Sant’Anna ( www.sssup.it) in Pisa,
8 SERVO 09.2010
