Robot Reviews

Helen Greiner's newly renamed company, CyPhy Works Inc., has just been awarded a $2.4 million research grant to build unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for inspecting buildings, bridges and other civil infrastructures.

The research will be fund ed by the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), a non-regulatory agency of the United States Department of Commerce. CyPhy Works, which was formerly known as Droid Works, will be partnering with Georgia Institute of Technology Research Corp. for this particular project. 

The idea is to design small UAVs to hover alongside civil infrastructures, capture high resolution images, and beam the information to engineers on the ground for assessment. This will make the task of monitoring and inspecting crucial infrastructures like dams and bridges all over the country much faster and more cost-efficient.

While the robots' navigation during outdoor inspections - such as on bridges, dams, and highways - can easily be facilitated using GPS, inspections done indoors (i.e. inside buildings) won't be as easy. This and other challenges, such as those related to civil engineering, is one reason why Greiner is planning to employ more specialized engineers for this specific project. 

UAV's are being used extensively in the military. As a matter of fact, the Predator UAV is one of the busiest military robots in action, being frequently tasked for aerial attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It's about time more peaceful counterparts of these robots are put into action to somehow diffuse the violent reputation of these machines.