London, September 19 : The U. S. army’s fleet of robots will soon be enhanced with the addition of forthcoming reconnaissance craft called the ‘hopping rotochute’, which will be capable of travelling deep into obstacle-ridden spaces like caves and rubble-laden buildings to video what it finds.

The self-righting probe is being developed for the Army Research Lab in Aberdeen, Maryland, by Eric Beyer and Mark Costello, a pair of robotics engineers at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

The project attains significance because present-day military robots, which run on small tank-style tracks, cannot cope with irregular surfaces and obstacles such as rubble or boulders.

"They usually have trouble and get stuck with even low obstacles and walls a couple of feet high," says Costello.

Although small helicopters are one alternative, continuous flying drains the batteries fast.

Thus, Costello stresses the need for a rotor-powered, bottom-heavy, self-righting vehicle that spends most of its time on the ground, conserving battery power.

AS to whether repeated hopping might harm the craft, a spokesman for the Impact Centre at Cranfield University in Bedfordshire, UK, said: "From a crashworthiness point of view this concept looks perfectly feasible. There should be no problem with the vehicle surviving hundreds of impacts, which is roughly equivalent to dropping a mobile phone from waist height." (ANI)