Rats, robots, and rescue

In early May, media inquiries started arriving at my office at the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (www.crasar.org). Because I\´m CRASAR\´s director, I thought the press was calling to follow up on the recent humanitarian award given to the center\´s founder, John Blitch, for successfully using small, backpackable robots at the World Trade Center disaster. Instead, I found they were asking me to comment on the "roborats" study in the 2 May 2002 Nature. In this study, rats with medial force brain implants underwent operant conditioning to force them into a form of guided behavior, one aspect of which was thought useful for search and rescue. The article\´s closing comment suggested that a guided rat could serve as both a mobile robot and a biological sensor. Although a roboticist by training, I\´m committed to any technology that will help save lives while reducing the risk to rescuers. But rats?.