Japan mulls new robot help with nuclear disaster
Baku, June 22 (AZERTAC). Japan may be at the forefront of robotics and its children raised on cartoons of robot heroes and villains, but the country has so far had to rely on US-made machines for help tackling its nuclear crisis.
The massive March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out reactor cooling systems at the Fukushima nuclear power plant northeast of Tokyo, where workers are battling to prevent radiation leaks and a total meltdown.
Although Japan is reliant on atomic power and leads the world in developing humanoid machines and industrial robots it has not developed any robots to tackle nuclear accidents.
Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has sent in a pair of US-made crawler PackBot robots to examine areas where radiation from the rubble left by explosions is too high for humans to enter.
Experts say the government has not provided enough funding to develop its own specialised disaster robots, which have no commercial market.
"In the case of housekeeping robots, the market is there and so the companies can continue the development," said Hajime Asama, professor of engineering at Tokyo University and a member of a robot taskforce set up after the disaster.
"In the case of the United States, the military invests a lot of money for this kind of robot. But in Japan it is prohibited to make military robots," he said.
A mistaken belief that such a nuclear disaster would never happen in Japan is also to blame, he said.
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