The U.S. Army has developed a robotic system for safely decontaminating military vehicles exposed to hazardous substances, including chemical and biological weapons, which pose a serious threat to soldiers.

The robotic system, dubbed the Autonomous Equipment Decontamination System, was created by the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Chemical Biological Center so that human soldiers can be removed from the threat of exposure to hazardous substances that the vehicle has encountered.

Source: U.S. ArmySource: U.S. Army

To enable this, the robotic system features a camera-mounted unmanned ground vehicle that can scan the entire surface of military vehicles to identify contaminated areas.

This contamination data is then wirelessly relayed by the system robot to remotely located system operators, while a robotic manipulator arm is then instructed to spray a decontamination slurry onto those chemical hotspots.

Currently, it takes an estimated 20 to 30 soldiers to manually decontaminate just one military vehicle for up to an hour using a process that reportedly consumes more than 500 gallons of water and 50 gallons of decontamination chemicals per vehicle.

Further, soldiers conducting decontamination tasks close to hazardous areas, are put at risk of enemy attack as well as exposure to nuclear, chemical and biological (NBC) agents, thus requiring soldiers to typically wear full-body protective gear for such manual decontamination processes.

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