USA TODAY International Edition
Robots help nail down the nuts and bolts of disposal of bombs
Military machines disarm explosives before they kill
BAGHDAD — Navyte chnician Michael Kapeluck rips into the injured soldier on the table with a wrench and a hammer. Not your standard operating tools. But not your standard soldier either. At least, not yet.
Kapeluck and a half dozen other specialists work in the U.S. military’s * rst deployed operating room for robots. He was sent to Iraq because he worked on robots at his base in San Diego, but “ they won’t have damage like this,” he says, holding up a shrapnel- punctured tube, once an arm.
The Iraq war, in which roadside bombs and car bombs have killed hundreds of U.S. troops and thousands of Iraqis, has made robots a regular part of the U.S. military formation. Roughly 300 are on duty daily here, assigned to the teams that disarm or destroy bombs that are found before they explode.
Whenever they can, teams send out a robot instead of a human when a roadside or car bomb is discovered before it has detonated.
Sometimes, using the robot’s arm byremo te control, they can disarm it. Other times, theyse nd the robot out with a small explosive to safely destroy the bomb. Occasionally, the bomb explodes anyway.
“ Each time one of these gets blown up, it has saved the life of an EOD ( Explosive Ordnance Disposal) technician,” says Sgt. Randy Davis, 21, of the Army’s 52nd Ordnance Group.
That’s already happened to two of his three- member team’s robots in just two months in Baghdad.
The bomb squad robots here don’t look much like R2D2. But there’s a little resemblance to Johnny 5, a robot in the late 1980s movies Short Circuit and Short Circuit 2
that developed lifelike intellect after being struck by lightning. Climate tough on robots
Troops call their robots Johnny 5 if they’re dependable. The robots with consistent maintenance problems get names that can’t be printed in a family newspaper, says Paul Varian, 42, a U.S. Army civilian employee at the robot shop, which is located on a U.S. base near the Baghdad airport.
Kapeluck is working on a Talon, the most common of the three models assigned to the military’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal teams.
All three are variations of robots sometimes used by police department bomb squads in the USA. The big difference here is that they’re used continuously, in an environment of grinding sand and extreme heat. Sometimes they get blown up.
“ I’ve had ( bomb disposal) units use the same robot for months,” says Greg Thompson, 44, a contractor from Las Vegas. “Other times, they blew it up that ( * rst) night. And all they brought back was a couple of tracks — that’s all they could * nd,” he said.
At up to $150,000 per robot system, the team tries to save all the parts it can.
The Talon, made by Foster- Miller, has two tracks, like a miniature tank, on either side of a chassis that weighs about 85 pounds without batteries. Mounted on top is an arm with an elbow in the middle and a plierslike grip at the end.
The control unit is mounted in a suitcase. The operator uses a “ joystick” and maneuvers the Talon with the help of pictures from small video cameras that showthe upcoming terrain and also focus on the grip.
Other models include the PakBot, by iRobot, which is about 30 pounds lighter. It’s faster and more portable and has a more sophisticated, two-elbow arm.
At the heavier end of the scale is the Andros Mini II, by Remotec, a division of Northrop Grumman. It’s bigger, at 200 pounds, and slow, at about 1 mph. The Talon goes about 1.8 mph and the PakBot twice that fast. But the Andros is strong enough to break the window of a suspected car bomb or to drag an injured soldier to safety. Expanding uses
With any of the models, a skilled operator, at a safe distance of up to 300 yards, can use the grip to disable a crude bomb or place the disabling explosive, Thompson said.
The wrecks at the robot repair shop show the power of the Iraqi insurgents’ bombs. There are shattered metal drive wheels, steel arms with their pincers ripped off and once- solid chassis that could now serve as colanders in the chow- hall kitchen. “ Some of these are beyond repair,” Thompson says.
The military plans to expand the use of robots beyond disarming bombs, increasing the number of robots on duty in Iraq to 1,000. The next batch will include small units that soldiers can send ahead to look for enemy ambushes or boobytr aps. These “ scout bots” are small enough to be thrown over a wall or into a window and to * t inside a backpack.
The robot programs are part of the $1 billion overseen byth e Pentagon’s Defeat IED Task Force. IED refers to improvised explosive devices.
Under development byt he Marine Corps and Carnegie Mellon University is a speedy little thing called the Dragon Runner. It has four wheels connected to a > at chassis that carries a battery and a video camera. The 9- pound device can be tossed over a wall and scoot at up to 20 mph.
Other models are even smaller, including a two-wheeler that looks like a small dumbbell and is operated like a grenade: A soldier pulls a pin to activate it and then throws it at the target. It carries a camera to send back video.
“ There’s a lot of concept development that they’re proo * ng-out over here,” Varian says.