Army Robots to Help Rescuers

By Laurie Garrett | STAFF WRITER

September 16, 2001

A high-tech squad of military search-and-rescue professionals will soon join thousands of men and women digging for bodies at ground zero. They are Army robots, declassified only for emergency purposes.

The 25 robots range from baseball-sized devices that can be tossed into a site to 45-pound rovers that can crawl over rubble.

"These are military platforms," Lt. Col. John Blitch, leader of the Center for Robot Assisted Search and Rescue for the Army, explained yesterday in an interview. "They're actually classified systems that we downgraded to bring to this environment."

Blitch, the robots and a small team of engineers arrived in New York yesterday and may go into the World Trade Center debris field today. The group is based in Littleton, Colo.

These "'bots," as they are popularly termed, carry cameras, microphones, remote transmitters, night-viewing devices, infrared and other capabilities. Battle tested in Kosovo and Sarajevo, , some of them are operated by soldiers who wear virtual reality masks and see, literally, what the 'bot relays.

So tough that they can withstand being thrown from airplanes and moving trucks, they are made of various materials including steel, graphite and plastic polymers.

"One of the strongest points I have to make is that these are not rescuing anybody," Blitch emphasized repeatedly. "They are simply a tool for the real heroes, the firefighters and police."

With each day the possibility that rescue workers or the Army's 'bots will find a survivor in the rubble grows dimmer. But there may still be a role for the devices.

The millions of tons of debris that once was the World Trade Center is riddled with chasms and voids, said Peter Bakersky, chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

"The bigger the pile, the more chances of hitting a void," he said.

Though structural engineers are on site, trying to spot such chasms, firefighters are at continual risk of falling through false layers of debris.

"It's almost like walking on ice caverns," Bakersky said.

The robots could be used to investigate such chasms and voids, determining the size and stability of a void, without endangering the lives of rescue workers.