Science and TechnologyMonitorCaught in a BEAR hugRobotics: A newly designed robot can recover casualties from battlefields, and might also be able to make itself useful to soldiers in other waysKILLING a soldier removes one enemy from the fray. Wounding him removes three: the victim and the two who have to carry him from the battlefield. That cynical calculation lies behind the design of many weapons that are intended to incapacitate rather than annihilate.But robotics may change the equation.The Battlefield Extraction-Assist Robot, or BEAR for short, is, in the words of Gary Gilbert of the United States Army's Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Centre (TATRC),"a highly agile and powerful mobile robot capable of lifting and carrying a combat casualty from a hazardous area across uneven terrain".When it is not saving lives, it can perform difficult and repetitive tasks, such as loading and unloading ammunition.The current prototype BEAR is a small, tracked vehicle with two hydraulic arms and a set of video cameras that provide a view of its surroundings to its operator via a wireless link.It has been developed by TATRC in collaboration with Vecna Technologies, a company based in Maryland that invented the robot.Daniel Theobald, BEAR's inventor and Vecna's boss, says versatility is at the heart of the robot's design.
