Military Robots Will Patrol World Cup

iRobot

NIC HALVERSON | Discovery News

To help keep the peace at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, FIFA has decided to go high-tech by enlisting military robots for security.

iRobot recently announced that it will outfit Brazil with 30 PackBot robots, units similar to those that have been deployed in Afghanistan, Iraq and inside Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant.

Each PackBot is camera-equipped and remotely controlled to allow operators to examine suspicious objects and explore threatening environments. The robots will work in tandem with thousands of soldiers who will be patrolling the 12 host cities in Brazil. The $7.2 million in contracts include maintenance, spares and associated equipment.

Officers will sport facial-recognition camera glasses that claim to capture 400 facial images per second, then archive each face in a database that stores up to 13 million faces.

Read the whole story at Discovery News