Vision

"You have visions? Go see a doctor!" - these pragmatic words are attributed to the former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt

"Dreams are necessary, if you want to create the future" - said French poet Victor Hugo.

Only one thing is for sure. The future is an utterly complex thing, now more then ever, but we wish to design just very few of its aspects. And here we are, dreaming, because thats how it starts.

Dreams transform into ideas. These will be discussed, improved, developed, rejected and sometimes - realized. To emphasize this, here are a couple of ideas we plan to work on in the long run.

Our robot should be controlled by humans, regardless whether they have a degree in engineering or not. Therefore, the Robot must come closer to the humans. Speech recognition would be one way to achieve this.

The robot is stacked with sensors to provide a picture of his surroundings. GPS, 3D-Accelerometer, LIDAR, Ultrasonic approach sensors, a fully articulated camera, and, possible for future endeavors, various temperature or gas sensors, provide vital information. The use of this information could be increased by sharing it, to firefighters or other autonomous machines.

Unfortunately, nature is not very keen on making things easy for us. Although already very mobile, certain terrains like creeks or puddles are impassable. Why not upgrade to some sort of wheel more suited to this challenge?

The design of the robot aims at being suitable for a vast variety of situations. While versatility is generally a good strategy, it comes at a price. Compromises must be made at the expense of special abilities. Special equipment, like a smaller robot or a quadrocopter drone could be loaded on a trailer and used if needed. The machines could interact to solve even more demanding tasks.