The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is deploying a platoon of robot sentinels to patrol an ultra-sensitive Nevada nuke site.
As Danger Room’s Noah Shachtman notes, the Nevada site – which withstood thousands of Cold War nuclear weapons tests – contains tens of millions of cubic feet of low-level radioactive waste.
The small autonomous robots, dubbed Mobile Detection Assessment Response System (MDARS), are remotely operated from a command center at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
Onboard sensors and real-time video allow the operators to identify intruders or suspicious activity.
Nevertheless, the MDARS units are fully capable of operating independently and only require direct operator action to assess situations on an “as needed” basis.
