FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

Welcome the New Robot National Guard

With Hurricane Sandy getting out of our hair, the Pentagon is calling for a full-fledged, disaster-ready robot squad.

As Sandy’s windy tentacles ease their strangle-hold on New England, the Pentagon is calling on the country’s top engineers to build an ensemble of rescue robots that would deploy when the next big one hits.

DARPA is hosting a public competition to see who can build the best robots for use in emergencies like the Fukushima nuclear crisis, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill or the Chilean mine collapse. Such unforeseen catastrophes, DARPA says, “highlight our fragility” as a species and necessitate a new order of safety precautions that the Pentagon plans to build around a Justice League-esque team of humanoid robots. The team that builds the best bot walks away with $2 million.

Read the rest over at Motherboard.