Robot Bear to Help Injured Soldiers
BBC News is carrying an article today about VECNA Technologies latest project, The BEAR: Battlefield Extraction and Retrieval Robot.
The BEAR is designed to enter into dangerous situations to retrieve injured soldiers, carrying them to safety in its forklift truck like arms.
Bizarrely the robot features a teddy bear like head, designed to reassure patients that he really is a nice guy. As Gary Gilbert, from the US Army’s Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Centre puts it:
“A really important thing when you’re dealing with casualties is trying to maintain that human touch.”
I don’t know about anyone else, but if I lay injured on the battlefield as a 6 ft tall robot with a bears head started coming at me I’d be rather worried…
This entry was posted on Friday, June 8th, 2007 at 10:47 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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