02:06Italy: Meet the humanoid bot made to tackle emergency situations
It's a European project actually, and a collaboration between many developments IT and also collaboration of other partners in Europe. We want to demonstrate this robot in a real scenario, together with Civil Protection body here in Italy and this demonstration will take place one and half year from now."
The humanoid robot Walk-man showed of some of his life-saving capabilities in Genoa Thursday, as the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) and University of Pisa develop the hardware for disaster response operations.
The 185-centimetre-high (72 inch) robot is a result of the four-year research program which started in October 2013 aimed at assisting or even replacing humans in civil damaged sites including buildings, such as factories, offices and houses.
"This is actually an anthropomorphic robot that was developed to assist humans during situations where actually we have physical disaster: disasters made by humans or the environments that becomes hostile and dangerous for emergency responders to intervene," said IIT Senior researcher Nikolaos Tsagarakis.
"The propose of the project is to bring the technology to a level required for robots to autonomously perform after physical disasters or other kind of disasters done by humans and assist humans in this kind of difficult situations to solve the crisis," he added.
The first prototype of the Walk-man robot will participate in the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals - biggest robot competition worldwide - in June.
02:06It's a European project actually, and a collaboration between many developments IT and also collaboration of other partners in Europe. We want to demonstrate this robot in a real scenario, together with Civil Protection body here in Italy and this demonstration will take place one and half year from now."
The humanoid robot Walk-man showed of some of his life-saving capabilities in Genoa Thursday, as the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) and University of Pisa develop the hardware for disaster response operations.
The 185-centimetre-high (72 inch) robot is a result of the four-year research program which started in October 2013 aimed at assisting or even replacing humans in civil damaged sites including buildings, such as factories, offices and houses.
"This is actually an anthropomorphic robot that was developed to assist humans during situations where actually we have physical disaster: disasters made by humans or the environments that becomes hostile and dangerous for emergency responders to intervene," said IIT Senior researcher Nikolaos Tsagarakis.
"The propose of the project is to bring the technology to a level required for robots to autonomously perform after physical disasters or other kind of disasters done by humans and assist humans in this kind of difficult situations to solve the crisis," he added.
The first prototype of the Walk-man robot will participate in the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals - biggest robot competition worldwide - in June.