Science Questions

Can robots smell out landmines?

Can you programme robots to smell out landmines? Pooki Amsterdam, Second Life

Probably you could but you need to rely on some kind of electronic nose, these e-noses.  I don’t know how good our technology is at the moment with sniffing these things out with something that’s portable and cheap.  The benefit of combining a simple robot with a well trained Mongoose is that it’s very low-cost and it is quite disposable.  If you blow up a very expensive equipment obviously there’s a greater cost to that.

April 2008