The seventh annual Western National Robot Rodeo is set to get under way today in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The five-day event is hosted by Sandia National Laboratories, and will feature civilian and military bomb squad teams from across the land. The goal of the 10-event technical challenge is to find the best robot designs for diffusing dangerous situations. The indoor and outdoor challenges change and evolve each year, but typically involve some sort of explosive or hazardous material removal.

Sandia National Laboratories is closely linked with the US Energy department. It has a .gov top-level domain, and is a governement-owned facility. On the other hand, it is operated and managed by the Sandia corporation, which is in fact a wholly-owned subsidary of Lockheed Martin. With close to 10,000 employees, the Albuquerque facility is more like a small city. In addition to national security programs in nuclear weapons, it has many projects dealing with bioweapon threats and other biohazards.

The robot rodeo is a natural extension of Sandia’s efforts to develop a platform that can remove the human element from the first response to unkown or dangerous situations. It is a free event that includes entries from several police departments and military bases in the surrounding states.

Many private companies have entered into the huge market for mobile robots that has been created by the surveilance needs of ordinary police departments. One need that emerged is the ability to bore through a wall and poke in an electronic eye to have a look around. Extending the capability of these mobile camera arms to perform other active manipulatory roles has proven to be a tough step.

Some of the challenges might include, for example, opening a cooler, diffusing a trip wire, or navigating an obstacle course. To meet these challenges, many basic body plans are still being explored. The current robot situation is somewhat like the famous Cambrian explosion, which spanned a comparatively brief evolutionary time period some 540 million years ago. During this time, life explored many unique design configurations and symmetries in search of the ideal form to expand upon. The bilaterally-symetric four-limbed chassis so common today was the obvious victor.

For mobile robots, perhaps the most versatile design is proving to be a skid-steer drive where a four-wheeled mount can be quickly reconfigured to support a track drive. Sometimes the track can be simply put over the wheels to gain traction at the expense of speed and efficiency. While the advantages of wheels are hard to deny, we might soon begin to see the emergence of legged hybrids, or even all-leg designs like the Big Dog.

Many of the basic dual-track robots might price in around the $30k range. Although that is a tight squeeze for a complex legged robot, they could save by multiplexing a locomotive appendage as a manipulator appendage. For extreme environments, like space, the curiousity rover would be envious of a new machine in the works known as the JPL Athlete. This versatile rover has combination limb-manipulators that have active tool changers at the hand positions. They provide power feed-thru to a wide range of possible end-effectors including drills, grippers, and saws. Included among the various “tools” it can deploy are wheels for higher speed mobility. While it is doubtful that there will be any ATHLETE designs at this years robot rodeo, we may see one yet in years to come.