Posted on 01/08/2012 1:52:58 PM PST by aldabra
They've always been man's best friend but now rescue dogs will be kitted out with new wireless head-cameras to help save lives in emergencies.
Rescue dogs sent into disaster zones such as the Japanese tsunami will have the new equipment attached to their heads to assist them in their search for survivors.
The portable all-terrain wireless - known as PAWS - system consists of a specially-adapted headcam and harness which are fitted to the search dogs that are able to enter collapsed buildings where humans cannot reach. ...
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Dogcam Ping
Barney! Where are ya, Barney.
David Letterman was doing this 20 years ago.
While this can be good, they need to get far smaller.
For example, some rodents are fast and very versatile, able to scramble through very small holes, and intelligent enough to figure out how to overcome obstacles.
Squirrel obstacle course:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxDKzHg_1e0
Remember that they can dig holes, have acute vision, smell and hearing, and respond very well to training.
They could likely be trained to give different responses to finding a living or dead person, important in a collapsed structure. And a small, lightweight camera and transmitter could even be put in their body, with only a fiber optic “lens” exposed.
They do not look like happy kitties.
I don’t know about squirrels in particular, but most rodents have fairly short lifespans. If training took even half as long as an intelligent SAR dog, the rodent’s entire youth and middle age would be eaten up already, and any genetic timebombs like a tendency towards cancer would be approaching quickly.
There’s already an issue with various types of working dogs living a relatively short time compared to their training period...I can’t see this being any better.
Thanks for the pings. So cute!
The way around this problem is “mass production training”.
Dogs are difficult to train, because they are highly intelligent and individualistic. Squirrels, however, could be put through intensive Skinnerian training in a continual process at a centralized training facility.
The end result was that you take 20 squirrels, out of thousands, and release them on a big pile of building rubble. They scramble all over it until they can find or dig a passage inside it. And they keep going in until they locate living or dead people.
Then they give out one of two signals.
After a length of time they get a recall signal. But in the final analysis, they are very redundant and expendable.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.