In the future, robots will be the first to arrive in a disaster site. Today the progress we have made tells us the story of our future.

The story will go as following: earthquake happens, first thing that sifts through rubble is an army of mouse robots supported by robotic helicopters. There only mission: find survivors. Then, after survivors are located,  a second team of  mule like robots are sent. Their mission: rescue the survivors by carrying them to safety.

The story seems far fetched, but our future will have these robot because we are already creating prototypes that  are very similar to the robots described above.  Take the example of the mouse robot. There is a  an elegant robot called SCRATCHbot that is designed after a mouse.

According to Bristol Robotics Laboratory’s website the robot has 18 whiskers, and a neck with 3 degrees of freedom. By using it’s whiskers, it feels its way through, and identifies location of different objects.

If a simple object recognition software is incorporated into it, it would be able to locate human survivors very easily.

Watch  it in action here:

Similarly, two engineers in Turkey have created a small robotic helicopter that uses Microsoft robotic studio in combination with Microsoft Virtual earth and Windows streaming capabilities. It is called the RoboTurk. The robot takes command from a command center and send streams of video back from a disaster site.

Finally, previously we discussed a robot that acts and looks like a mule. It was Boston Dynamics big dog. It could easily carry load of 340lb; hence, it can carry an average human.

Above is just a few examples of robots that can be fitted in the story I discussed above. There are many more, and as the time passes we will perfect them, and add more and more functionality to them to help us save lives.

I will end this article with following video which demonstrates a future scenario where robots will search and rescue: