Robots in the Disney Land of Disaster

NY Times:

It was another perfect day in Disaster City.

Two trains, carrying passengers and dangerous chemicals, were jackknifed. An office tower and parking garage had pancaked. And black smoke rose in the distance.

But Eyeball, Dragon Runner, ToughBot, Marv, Matilda and Talon were unfazed.

Robots all, they and their fearless, expendable ilk crawled, rolled or hovered over the carnage for several days at a training center here affiliated with Texas A&M University, transmitting images, sniffing for poisons and hauling out dummies in an exercise to grade robots in rescue work.

“I call it a great playground,” said Thomas Meyer of Germany as he sent his company’s AirRobot, an airy wire ring housing a motorized camera and four buzzing rotors, in search of “survivors.” “But it’s a serious situation because people have to deal with the reality.”

The military is already using some of the robots in Iraq to spy out insurgent ambushes and to detect and remove explosive devices.

“Every time I see one of these blown up, it’s a bomb tech’s life that was saved,” said Martin T. Foley, global antiterrorism manager for Foster-Miller of Waltham, Mass., maker of the Talon and the Talon Hazmat, equipped to handle hazardous materials.

Opened in 1997, the 52-acre Disaster City of wreckage and rubble is operated by the university’s Texas Engineering Extension Service, known as TEEX, for the training of the state’s emergency response forces and firefighters and rescue workers from all over the world.

The robotics exercise, the fourth in two years to be sponsored by the Science and Technology Directorate at the Department of Homeland Security and the National Institute of Standards and Technology at the Commerce Department, has a complex task: finding ways of evaluating performance of robots so that they can be fairly compared.

...

One site combined elements of the Mexico City earthquake, the explosion in the World Trade Center garage, the Oklahoma City bombing and the terror attack on the Pentagon, with crushed vehicles and plastic models of severed body parts strewn around for grisly effect.

...

This place is on a few miles from Washington, Texas near the campus of Texas A&M. A lot of engineers and former fire fighters run the place. They have a pretty cool website too. The robots are designed for use in rescue work.