In a ‘real life’ scenario played out in an empty shopping unit, the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) has tested the ability of robotic and autonomous systems to navigate through a building and detect, sample and remediate (clean) a contaminated environment.

Check out the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DQAZkQkM_Q

The era of the DogArm has arrived.

In all seriousness though, so long as investment into this is done wisely it will save lives the next time a nuclear disaster happens or some other large contamination event happens. Even if the technology is mediocre, there are already numerous examples of disasters in history where all that was needed was for someone to sacrifice themselves to turn a lever or some other relatively simple task under lethal or near lethal conditions, if a robot even has a chance of being able to do these things we owe it to each other to invest in building that capacity.