Smushing Three Robots Together Could Save Your Life Dubbed the Hybrid Bot by its creators at the Modular Robotics Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, this amalgamated animatronic combines the powers of wheeled snake-bots—two of them in fact—which are ideal for investigating crevasses and other tight spaces, as well as a quadcopter to airlift the other snake robots into position via a magnetic lock system. Each snake can easily navigate up 4-inch pipes and staircases on their own but in situations where every second counts, the quadcopter can shave valuable seconds and minutes off the snake-bots travel time. In an emergency situation—a collapsed building for example—first responders would be able to deploy a system like this as soon as they arrive on scene. Since the snake-bots are relatively small—compared to, say, human-sized robot-firefighters—they wouldnt damage the already shaky structure, potentially causing a further collapse, and be able to slip into tiny gaps that people or even SAR dogs wouldnt dare venture. The University of Pennsylvania team recently shared their findings at the 2014 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.
Posted on: Thu, 25 Sep 2014 02:35:42 +0000
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