Grieving father turns to robots to save lives

TYNGSBOROUGH - The knock on Brian Hart's door came at 6am. An Army colonel, a priest and a police officer had come to tell the Massachusetts man and his wife that their 20-year-old son had been killed when his military vehicle was ambushed in Iraq.

Brian Hart didn't channel his grief quietly. Committed to "preventing the senseless from recurring", he railed against the military on his blog for shortcomings in supplying armour to soldiers. The one-time Republican teamed with liberal Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy to tell Congress that the Pentagon was leaving soldiers ill-equipped.

And then Hart went beyond words to fight his cause. He became a defence contractor.

He founded a company that has developed rugged, relatively inexpensive robotic vehicles, resembling small dune buggies, to disable car bombs and roadside explosives before they detonate in hot spots such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now, Hart has won over the military brass he so harshly criticises. Three years after starting Black-I Robotics Inc, Hart and his four employees won a US$728,000 ($961,700) contract from the Pentagon in June to further develop the "LandShark" robot.

Technology to protect troops is a subject too close to home for Hart, who says the death of his son, Army Private First Class John Hart, left him in "total devastation".

Brian Hart can't forget the call he got from his son in Iraq a week before he was killed by a gunshot on October 18, 2003.

"He asked me to help him: "Get us body armour and vehicular armour,"' Brian Hart said. "He thought he'd be killed on the road in an unarmoured Humvee. And a week to the day later, he was."

The Pentagon contract requires Black-I to supply three of its six-wheeled, electric-powered vehicles this year and provide support.

The military will test two units, while Boston's Logan Airport will get one for bomb-disposal duties. If tests go well, soldiers in Iraq could be using the robots as soon as next year, Hart says.

His company is also trying to secure an additional US$1.5 million in Pentagon funding for the next financial year.

At 125kg and about 1.22m-long, Black-I's LandShark looks like a dune buggy without a seat for a human driver.

Hart hopes to make them available for commercial sale to law enforcement next year, with an expected cost of US$65,000 to US$85,000 per robot, including the chassis and add-on bomb-disposing equipment.

The vehicle can pull tilling equipment to plough up soil where an explosive or trip wire may be hidden. Or it can drop off "disrupters" that can be manoeuvered near a bomb and set off, with jets of water disabling the bomb.

Hart contends LandSharks will be far less expensive than many of the Pentagon's current bomb-disposing robots, including models made by two larger Boston-area companies, iRobot Inc. and Foster-Miller Inc. Those models have more sophisticated electronics, but are also more fragile than LandSharks, which use car batteries rather than lighter and pricier lithium-ion batteries.

A Foster-Miller vice-president, Bob Quinn, called Hart a "superb individual," but countered that the LandShark is too big and heavy to be practical for most soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Quinn said soldiers using his company's US$100,000-plus Talon robots typically carry four of the hand-portable, 36kg bots in military vehicles, along with other cargo. The advantage of this approach, he said, is that multiple robots are needed as backups.

While many Pentagon critics, including families of soldiers, have spoken out about better gear for soldiers, Brian Hart stands apart for his decision to launch a company focused on troop protection, said Bill Thomasmeyer, president of the National Centre for Defence Robotics. The Pittsburgh-based nonprofit organisation helps robotics firms like Black-I compete for government contracts.

"His company has had to overcome a lot of obstacles to get to this point, without having a lot of resources," Thomasmeyer said.

Another company founder is Hart's younger brother, Richard, a former Marine who serves as a Black-I product designer. But the staff is otherwise made up of acquaintances from Hart's previous ventures, unrelated to robotics or military contracting.

At Black-I, Hart and his staff relied on basic knowledge of mechanical and electrical engineering to design their robotic buggies. They cut costs by pairing custom design features with components already available commercially from other makers of small vehicles and remote-control gadgets. The off-the-shelf parts, such as the car batteries, are also expected to simplify repairs and maintenance.

Hart still argues that the military must remake itself to meet ground troops' basic needs and wean itself off expensive high-tech systems.

"We are spending billions upon billions on technologies and equipment we will never use, while we short-change our infantrymen on basic equipment that will save their lives in combat," Hart said.
NZH