The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : A robot for all purposes

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Monday, Jan 07, 2008
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Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

A robot for all purposes

Staff Reporter

They have also helped save the lives of scores of soldiers

Bangalore: How technology can be used in hostile areas was demonstrated in the form of a tactical robot here on Saturday.

The iRobot PackBot 510 was manoeuvred with the help of a wireless control panel and performed tasks such as moving in all directions and picking and disposing of objects. The robot had been fitted with two state-of-the art audio video devices which could send moving images as well as sound up to a distance of half a km.

Aakash Sinha, Director (Business Operations and Development) iRobot Corporation, said these tactical robots had been used in the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan for purposes such as surveillance, bomb identification and disposal, checkpoint inspections, route clearance, sniper detection, perimeter patrol, structure mapping and re-supply.

Having performed all these functions in tens of thousands of missions, these robots have been credited with saving the lives of scores of soldiers.

The robots of iRobot, founded in 1990 by roboticists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have been utilised from war zones in West Asia to the surface of Mars to the unexplored corners of Egypt’s Great Pyramid. To date, more than 2.5 million Home Robots have been sold worldwide and over 1,200 iRobot PackBot Tactical Mobile Robots have been deployed worldwide, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mr. Sinha said that the company was currently trying to convince the Indian armed forces and other private firms of the immense success from the utilisation of the tactical robots to curb problems such as insurgency, militancy and riots.

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