The World Cup in Brazil will be guarded by robots, drones and police with glasses that recognize faces

The American company iRobot, which produces not only popular Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners, but also a line of semi-autonomous military robots, last week signed a $ 7.2 million contract with the Brazilian government for the supply and maintenance of 30 PackBot 510 robots to work during the World Cup Football 2014 These robots have proven themselves in Afghanistan and Iraq and helped to eliminate the consequences of the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. The main purpose of PackBot is the detection and disposal of bombs and hazardous substances, reconnaissance and surveillance in dangerous and hard-to-reach places.

Over the years of service in the hot spots, a relative of the peaceful American vacuum cleaner has got an impressive set of accessories and accessories - various cameras and searchlights, a portable chemical laboratory for the detection of explosive and toxic substances, manipulators capable of reaching objects at a height of more than two meters, wire cutters, a water gun for safe destruction explosive devices, a device for breaking windows of cars, a rich set of communication equipment for all occasions.

The chassis of the robot allows you to move at a speed of about 10 km / h, to overcome the steps and slides with a slope of up to 60 degrees, roll over after a fall. It can work in any weather and overcome water barriers less than a meter deep. The robot can go on a given route using GPS. In order to ensure stable radio communication in hard-to-reach places, several robots can be networked, transmitting a signal through each other, for this purpose special intermediate radio modules that the robot can install on the route are used. If the connection is still broken, it automatically retreats back along the same path along which it came, until the connection is restored.

To control the robot is a special laptop and controller, similar to the game. A fully equipped robot weighs 25-30 kg and costs between 100 and 200 thousand dollars, depending on the set of accessories and manipulators. On the iRobot website, you can download a PDF with detailed specifications of the robot and a catalog of accessories.
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The seven millionth contract with iRobot is only a tiny part of the budget allocated to providing security for the World Cup. In total for these purposes one billion seven hundred million dollars will be spent . The money will go both to purchase quite familiar equipment: video cameras, police helicopters, metal detectors and the like, and some other high-tech innovations. Thus, four Israeli-made Hermes 450 drones will observe from the air in June of this year, during the 2013 Confederations Cup, which also takes place in Brazil.



Brazil is already using these drones for border patrols. " Hermes 450 " can be in the air for up to twenty hours. Although according to some reports, it can carry air-to-surface missiles, its main purpose is precisely observation, reconnaissance and communications.

Another new feature is that Brazilian police will have Ex-Eye glasses with video cameras, a display like Google Glass and Intel Atom laptops connected to a wireless network that will record video, recognize faces and look for matches in a database of millions of criminals, terrorists and football hooligans. This will speed up and simplify the work of the police. Brazilian television compares the police in these glasses with Robocop:



The system developer is the Israeli company Ex-Sight . The system can work with any video cameras, so long as they give a picture in a sufficiently high resolution - the distance between the eyes should be at least 40 pixels. For a few tenths of a second, the persons caught in the frame are recognized, and for each of them a “fingerprint” is created, containing biometric characteristics. Each such print occupies only 2.4 kilobytes, which makes it possible to quickly scan large databases. In addition to faces, the system can recognize the numbers of cars.