Utah Mine Collapse and Robots

There are robots used inside pipelines for inspections (referred to as
"pigs" IIRC).  I would think one of those might work here, perhaps with
a few adaptations.

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They already exist and many are under development. It is an area I
would like to research personally but the funding for such research is
hot property.

Not so much a pipe inspection robot. These don't have the
maneuverability on the mine floor. There are quite a few (larger)
tracked robots for inspecting bombs and such. There may not be something
specifically designed for mine rescue, but I'm wondering if someone
makes a small enough uint that could be dangled down the pipe and set on
the mine floor. Perhaps something for searching collapsed buildings.

Heck, once the pipe proved to be poorly located for a fixed camera, it
might be worthwhile sending someone down to the local hobby shop to pick
up a radio controlled car and a wireless TV camera. That's a lot cheaper
then the next shaft they'll have to sink.

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Paul Hovnanian     mailto:Paul@Hovnanian.com
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Sleep is for wimps. Happy, healthy, well-rested wimps, but wimps
nonetheless.

Robin Murphy's interests are strong in this area.

http://www.csee.usf.edu/~murphy/

She was Arkin's student, and wrote "Introduction to AI Robotics" I'm
now reading. A very pleasant read by the way. I highly recommend it.

http://www.csee.usf.edu/~murphy/book/

She was the one behind the robots that helped in the WTC search.

See some of the links on her home page.

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Randy M. Dumse
www.newmicros.com
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The shafts are something like 2000 ft deep.  It's not something that's easy
to hack together a solution with radio shack parts.  I'm sure they have a
lot of smart people considering all possible options.  The last thing you
would want to do is mess up the hole that took you so long to drill by
having a cheap cable break and then fill the hole up with cable and a $15
radioshack R/C car.

The hope I'm sure was to get a shaft to an area were the people were.  If
someone was alive in the area where the shaft went, they would have made
some noise.  If they didn't have enough energy to make noise, there's not
much good the shaft would do other than get air to them.

As far as I know, there has been no sign of anyone alive.  No noise at all,
not even a rock banging, when they tried to contact the minors using a
microphone.  If the minors were alive and anywhere near the area they
drilled into they should have been able to hear something.  There's not
much a robot can do that a microphone can't do in terms of finding someone
alive in a tunnel like that.

The normal purpose of search and rescue robot it to figure out if you need
to dig in the first place. Whether there is sign of life or not, they're
going to keep digging as fast as they can until they find the minors, dead
or alive so I don't think there's a lot the robot could do, or tell them,
that would change what they were doing anyway.

The idea of building robots to explore a mine that could be dropped down a
hole like that is an obvious good idea to have around.  I'm sure there are
some robots today that could already do it because I know there are people
working (and using) search and rescue robots.  But having to drop down such
a long shaft would require something designed for that distance.  Most
robots I know of don't come with 1/3 mile theaters (which would also have
to be strong enough to hold the weight of the cable and the robot).

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Curt Welch                                            http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@kcwc.com                                        http://NewsReader.Com/