For disasters, firefighting and various other emergency situations, the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunications is developing Intelligent Mobile Robots (IMR) that will be equipped with modern sensors and communication devices with AI and computational capabilities to mitigate disaster situations like terrorism, industrial fires, floods, and earthquakes.
The robots will have autonomous and manual control, along with various features such as detection, extinguishing fires and other intelligent behaviors like object detection, finding a target and collision avoidance. The robots are said to small in size, and therefore will be effective for extinguishing fire in tricky areas where rescue operations aren’t possible.
The National ICT Research and Development Fund is working on this project with the Ministry of IT, and the Karachi Institute of Economics and Technology is working as a principal investigator organization.
The estimated cost of this project is said to be around Rs14.68 million. All the IMRs will be built in-house and will be available for local industries, hospitals, and offices where they will act as a workforce in the respective departments.
Furthermore, these robots can also be effectively utilized in adverse circumstances as well as in harsh weathers for surveillance investigation, tracking, rescue operations and map generation. At present, there are several small-scale IMRs that are available in the market but have manual controls and therefore do not guarantee a successful mission.
