A Nose for Toxins: Feral Robotic Dogs - Getting the Word Out
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In addition to New York and California, feral robotic dog projects have been conducted in Florida, the Netherlands, and Ireland. Several colleges now have feral robotic dog programs. Professor Jeremijenko was even interested at one point in finding volunteers for a trip to Baghdad with dogs programmed to sniff out gamma radiation.
Another future site for release is in Snake River, Idaho, at the Idaho Engineering and Environmental Laboratory. It was a Navy bombing range in World War II, the site of a nuclear reactor in 1949, and was used to store nuclear waste in 1952. It eventually housed 52 total reactors, and was the site of 27 meltdowns. In 1961 it was the site of the first fatal nuclear accident, in which three workers were killed and had to be buried in sealed, lead-lined coffins because of the radioactivity their bodies absorbed.
The dogs themselves are cool, but Professor Jeremijenko likes to point out that they were modified to serve a higher purpose. “We like to call them a weapon of mass instruction,” she notes. Indeed, the dog releases get information about possible environmental toxins to a wide audience; usually the newspapers and local TV stations send reporters to cover the event.
According to Professor Jeremijenko, “Releasing packs of robot dogs creates a mediagenic event – because the dogs appear to be sniffing something out, they display the information through their movement. A four-year-old and a grandmother can understand what these dogs are doing and what it means to them.”
While I haven’t been able to locate them on the Internet yet, Professor Jeremijenko spoke of creating assembly instructions that could be downloaded. They would allow almost anyone who is handy with tools and has access to the appropriate parts to make a feral robotic dog capable of sensing and tracking pollutants. This could be one novel science fair project; who would think a plastic puppy could change the way one looks at the world?
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