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Next time when you park your car in a no-parking zone and hope and pray that the tow truck is miles away. Pray harder.
A team of European scientists have developed the AVERT system—that's "Autonomous Vehicle Emergency Recovery Tool". It consists of a team of eight robots that can basically replace a tow truck. As you can see in the video below, four pairs of the incredibly sleek-looking little guys slip under the target car to pinch and lift its tyres off the ground. From there, they can autonomously drag it away while their base station uses robot eyes to pick out a safe path. So earlier you had the time to screech away from the penalty zone but with the AVERT, these robots would have done their job.
Seems and reads like an extremely well thought of job, the kind that special agents are often entrusted with. Though the technology is still in its development stages, we are sure by the time it becomes production ready in 2016, a lot of the niggles being experienced now will be ironed out and this alternative to the tow truck/flatbed can be used in a number of ways.
The system was designed with law enforcement in mind, specifically as a way to remove cars from areas too tight for a tow truck or flatbed to navigate, or to gingerly move vehicles that might be rigged to explode. It's easy to see the potential beyond that though. Just look at the way AVERT can make a car move effortlessly sideways and imagine how that could change the logistics of shuffling around cars in a crowded parking garage.
Can you think of any uses to this novel idea? Let us know below.
Source: PopularMechanics
