• Question: why do you build robots?

    Asked by 383eneq23 to Oliver on 13 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Oliver Moore

      Oliver Moore answered on 13 Mar 2019:

      So the application of the robots we build are to perform tasks which us humans cannot. So one particular application is inside a hot cell for a research facility. The hot cell is for essentially just cutting up waste material from a linear accelerator. There are a number of reasons why we cannot get humans to do this:

      – The material is very hot, imagine holding onto a the bottom of a hot saucepan, but a lot, lot hotter. We can’t really expect people to try and touch stuff like that, or at least, I wouldn’t be the first to volunteer

      -The material comes into the hot cell weighing a number of tons, I would like to meet someone who can lift that even with help from others

      -The material is radioactive enough so that if you are even say 10m from it, you would still most likely come to a fairly painful death within a few minutes

      So therefore, we design robots to go in and do these tasks for us, much safer and generally people find this approach much more ethical.

Comments