May 22nd, 2006
Soldiers Bonding with Robots in Iraq
By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews
iRobot is best known, as least to the consumer, for their Roomba vacuums. But it got as start as a military developer and its PackBot Tactical Mobile Robots are forming bonds with soldiers in Iraq. The PackBots are bomb defusal robots.
“Please fix Scooby Doo because he saved my life,” a soldier told repair technicians, according to (iRobot Chief Executive Colin) Angle’s account at last week’s Future in Review technology conference.
“I think it’s very rational,” he said. “(Scooby Doo) was someone, something, that was doing a great service for them and thus when they brought it back, it was viewed not just as a loss of a machine gun or a piece of body armor or a helmet. It was a loss of a contributing member of the team.” Source: Reuters
We Say: This reminds me somewhat of the devotion shown to Marine Corps dogs I recently saw on a History Channel show. They would pack wounded dogs out and get them to an aid station if they were wounded. iRobot is currently working on a sniper detection robot, as well.
Alex says:
Here’s an interesting link:
http://www.defensetech.org/archives/002279.html
“Someone must be using them, I guess. Otherwise, why would Naval Sea Systems Command buy another $26 million worth of iRobot’s explosive-disposal machines? But I’ve never met a bomb squad technician who actually bothered with one of the things. Too flimsy, they all say. Too hard to operate.
The Baghdad Bomb Squad used their iRobots to decorate their shop. Not far away, at the U.S. military’s central robot depot for Iraq, the iRobots sat on shelves, serenely gathering dust, while Foster-Miller’s Talon robots would come back, scarred and in pieces, after being chewed up by a bomb.
Foster-Miller, though, doesn’t have the PR megaphone that iRobot does. It doesn’t have a cute, little household machine to go along with its battlefield models. And when you go to military trade shows, you only see Foster-Miller sporadically. iRobot always seems to have a booth. Maybe there’s a connection, somewhere in there, to that big sale?”
May 23rd, 2006 at 8:12 am