Honda unveils a prototype of its disaster recovery robot
How long can you tolerate rain? 5 minutes? 10 minutes? Or twenty minutes? I guess not more than 5 minutes when it is Winter. But how can you survive a disaster if it becomes necessary to respond immediately even in rain?
Well, in such kind of situation we need some superpower, that works for us to take us out of the disastrous situations without bothering about the weather conditions.
Honda has unveiled a working prototype of robot that can do all you need to meet a disaster. The upcoming disaster recovery team is expected to be made up of an army of cheery orange robots as Honda shows us E2-DR dis response robot.
The robot’s working prototype that can do a lot was first revealed in an R&D paper in 2015.
It is a 1.68 meters high robo that weighs 85 kilograms. The robo can walk, step over objects, climb stairs and ladders even slink through narrow spaces and also traverse piles of debris.
The most astonishing spec of E2-DR is that it can tolerate rain for 20 straight minutes, and this spec makes the robo more than an actual man.
How Honda managed to minimise the size and weight of this robo? The company swapped out traditional cables for rigorously-tested optical fibres.
E2-DR is powered by a 1000-Wh lithium-ion battery. The battery provides 90 minutes of juice and an Intel Core-i7 CPU. The battery is kept cool by air ducts and internal fans within the robot’s torso.
A labyrinth structure is followed to arrange the joints and to keep containments at bay. Camera and 3D sensors equipped hands to help the robot in basic gripping and moving around.
Honda anticipates the robot interacting the world through special tools and wireless communication.
At the moment the research has missed fall testing while the company has noted that the robo can stand up after being knocked down.
The structural durability of E2-DR is not clear.
However, the company didn’t disclose the overall scale of the project and we can expect bigger things in the process.
Though the company stresses that the E2-DR is just a prototype and a lot of work is to be done to make it useful for the future disasters, we can expect humanoid robots that have been promised by science fiction, in the near future.
