Project Strider

Dealing with chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) incidents in the UK has traditionally entailed trained personal wearing cumbersome Personal Protective Equipment (PPE).

Often an incident can involve unknown, potentially lethal substances, requiring the PPE employed to be difficult to operate in, and putting an operator’s life at risk.

With advances in mobile robotics ─ particularly with beyond-line-of-sight operation, simultaneous location & mapping, machine vision and robotic manipulators ─ it is now possible to explore replacing humans with robots as being first-on-scene responders for CBRN events.

Robots reduce the potential for harm to operators and enable a new range of capabilities beyond what even a human can do.

Start-up Oxford Dynamics (OD) has secured a £1m contract from the UK’s Defense Science Technology Laboratory (Dstl) to design, build and demonstrate a novel CBRN response robot for end-customer Defra, the Department of Environment, Food & Rural Affairs.

The robot, known as STRIDER, is a tracked robot with a 6-DOF arm being designed to carry out complex reconnaissance, recovery, and decontamination missions in compromised urban environments as part of the UK’s homeland security capability. OD is exploring using STRIDER for other demanding environments such as search & rescue, nuclear and mining applications.