Sometimes a situation is too volatile to risk a human being. Whether it’s the aftermath of an Earthquake or scouting during a hostage negotiation, there are just some problems where it would be much safer to let a robot do the poking around. As it stands, several such robots exist at various stages of research — one of them is being developed in the UK and is called DORA.

DORA

DORA (demonstration of robot autonomy) is the brainchild of Roke Manor Research Ltd. and it is a fully autonomous platform designed to be used to explore dark, dangerous settings. It’s on board camera uses proprietary “structure-from-motion” techniques to build up a 3D map of it’s surroundings. This map is used to help DORA effectively navigate obstacles and search through it’s environment.

The experiment is centered on testing vision processing techniques and as a result it suffers from some of the downfalls of vision processing systems. DORA is only capable of accurately recognizing stationary objects. The researchers at Roke hope to correct this deficiency in the near future.

DORA and several others are being showcased at the Artifical Life Conference, currently being held in Winchester.

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