September 26 2008 / by John Heylin
Category: Technology Year: 2017 Rating: 5 Hot
October 16th, 2017, 02:12 The dreaded happens.
A 8.1 magnitude quake rocks the San Francisco Bay Area. The San Francisco side of the Bay Bridge partially collapses, taking some cars returning to the east bay after a night at the bars into the waters below. The new Oakland span, finished less than a year before, weathers the quake with only minor structural damage. The buildings in San Francisco don’t fair as well. 
For Harrison Thomas, the only thing he remembered was that the walls were shaking right before the floor of his apartment suddenly disappeared.
Responders on the scene did a quick survey of the scene and deploy snake-like robots to search for survivors. After twelve minutes Harrison Thomas is found wedged between the flooring of the second and third floor. A piece of wood has speared his leg, pinning him in place.
The crew at the scene uses the robots diamond-edged belt saw to carefully saw their way through the wood in order to aid in his removal. A doctor from St. Louis, on call since the disaster, views the proceedings from his local hospital. Seeing Harrison’s body, he determines that a surgery must be made before the rescue crews get to him in order to save his leg.
Morphine is injected into his leg in preparation for the surgery. UV sterilized tools, located inside the snake, are manipulated over a secure wireless connection to repair the neural and vascular damage done to his leg. Hours later, crews finally unearth Harrison and take him to a mobile hospital set up in a warehouse at Pier 5.
Without this technology, he would have lost his leg, possibly even died.
It only makes sense that this kind of robot, a search and rescue robot, is the next logical step. What good is finding someone buried in the rubble only to watch them slowly die? Yes, the simple fact that robots can aid in finding people helps a lot, but thee next step is finding and aiding.
In the snow, there’s the iconic image of the dog with a small keg of alcohol to help stranded skiers keep warm (doesn’t actually help FYI). Even today, dogs are outfitted with bottles of water to get into collapsed buildings and aid those trapped. Since we can’t teach dogs to perform basic first aid, why not use a robot which can perform complicated surgeries? Dean Kamen? Anyone?
Thankfully, there are people working on exactly this as we speak.
Image: Ken Conley (Flickr, CC-Attribution)
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