SEARCH teams in Manhattan are carrying out most of their grim task by hand,
but last week 12 robots were also on the scene. Six or more were due to arrive
later.
Only five people are thought to have made it out alive after the World Trade
Center collapsed. But for the first time in a major urban disaster, robots have
been working alongside rescuers to find people trapped in rubble. “We can get
them into places that no human can go,” says John Blitch, a retired lieutenant
colonel and a director at the National Institute for Urban Search and…
