Science Questions

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