Robots to the rescue – High-Tech helpers | DW Documentary

Robots to the rescue – High-Tech helpers | DW Documentary

It’s sometimes hard to keep pace with high-tech developments. But intelligent robots are helping us to go higher, faster and further. I think we’ll be able to improve the lives of millions of people. On the ground, underwater and in the skies a range of innovative ideas are making the world a safer place.

Shortly before their actual destination, this driver sees something that might be of interest to his European passenger. You have a clinic here. Yeah, we have a clinic here. Wow, can we see? Yeah. So show us your work. This is Tom Plümmer’s first time in Malawi. The 32-year-old German has big plans

And what he sees here is most encouraging. Ah, ok you do the check-ups here? So not inside, but here? No. The people come here, line up, and you treat them here? Yes! It’s a good example for showing what it’s really like out here a clinic with no electricity or water,

Where people basically get help once a month. But that area there, about six by six meters, could definitely be another hub to connect to our network. No problem. A “hub” in this case being a mini-airfield. Not for planes but for drones. Operations in Kasungu have been running for four years. Hey, guys.

Welcome officially to the… operations that we do. Finally! If you want to show me around, I am happy. But I don’t want to stop the operations. No, I’ll show you, we have a ‘One-ninety eight’ out here, too! Guys I am so happy to be here! Guys, I love to see you.

The latest model of the drone the ‘one-ninety eight‘ flies at speeds of up to 110 kilometers per hour and can ferry a payload of five kilograms to a destination 65 kilometers away. The “Wingcopter” is the brainchild of Tom Plümmer. You can see the drone up there.

What’s had the biggest impact on me, and who I am today, is my time in Ghana, west Africa. People were dying there simply because medication wasn’t available when it was needed. I thought: if we can help to change things, we must! Which is why we’re doing what we do here.

I then studied film at college back in Germany and wondered about the technology available especially drones able to fly anywhere. So: why not use them to transport medication? That was seven years ago. Since then the former film student has founded a cargo-drone company together with like-minded engineers and IT specialists

An enterprise earning millions in sales from commercial delivery services operating in 15 countries around the world. But Tom has never lost sight of his humanitarian goals both medical and social. We now have over 20 young local people who have learned everything from scratch. So in addition to improving and saving lives

By supplying vaccines, laboratory samples, blood reserves and medicine, we really can also create jobs. Some of these young people now have a job that’s well paid and involves future technology which is great. And now, in Kasungu, future technology is being used to provide basic medical care to over a hundred thousand people.

I just received an order from Livwezi, they have asked us to help them with an order, because they are completely stocked out. So, they ran out of medicine. And now we pick it up, bring it to the drone and send it? Exactly.

The lists we get let us know what’s needed in real time. In this case: there’s a little hospital pharmacy that stocks the medication but which is not available out in the villages. Four kilometers away from the flight hub is the main hospital of Kasungu. The medical supplies and the drones that transport them

Are funded by the German ministry for economic cooperation and development, and the Malawian health authorities. The small clinics in the countryside are difficult to reach, with poor infrastructure and roads. And the drone can solve that problem in a matter of minutes via the air. We can pick up the items here,

While the hospital is of course happy that the clinics, normally difficult to reach, are now suddenly being supplied at short notice. As the batteries are inserted and final checks are performed, the weather has calmed considerably since the tropical storm a few days ago. In the Swiss city of Zurich,

Other innovative minds have created an odd-looking contraption made of plastic and aluminum. Its makers called the canine-looking creature “ANYmal” due to its ability to go anywhere. It’s battery-operated, and can walk, see, feel, climb and lie down for a rest all on its own. Inventor Péter Fankhauser built his first robot

Over 10 years ago while studying at Zurich technical university. He helped develop ANYmal, and now directs a team of 110 people. When I was a kid I was fascinated by moving parts, and I soldered small solar cells from an electrical store to some Lego motors to see what was possible.

I later got into programming, and that’s how all the hardware and software came together, with robotics again at the center. AI has turned ANYmal into a smart robo-dog that can now monitor industrial facilities and sound the alarm when it detects irregularities. Human error is still the number-one cause of accidents,

And the robot doesn’t make these mistakes. So we can ensure safe operations while keeping individuals out of danger. In an indirect sense, the robot saves lives. The current edition has already been tried out in working environments considered high-risk for humans tasks involving perilous heights or where gas leaks can occur.

It also has no trouble working in total darkness or wet conditions. The new model will soon be tested as a guard and sniffer dog for use by one of the world’s largest corporations. But first the quadruped has to master a challenging training course. Samuel Zimmermann and Peter Fankhauser start the test.

It’s now on the docking station fully charged and ready for deployment. We’ll have the same set-up at the client’s premises, with the robot ready to go and us starting the mission from here. This is a test mission. The robot goes up there to read the display, then goes up the stairs,

Comes back down and scans a few other elements. Thanks to its regular and thermal-imaging cameras, ANYmal can analyze what it’s seeing and forward the data And, crucially, for working in industrial plants it can scale stairs. Sensors in the legs enable the machine to feel the ground underneath.

With that information stored by the AI unit, it learns continuously from every training session. Test mission completed! Perfect. Now we can send it on its way. The client is BASF. Its headquarters in Ludwigshafen covers some ten square kilometers one of the largest chemical complexes in the world.

The workforce of 39,000 works on building blocks for everything from plastics and paints to solvents and adhesives. Peter Welter is a robotics expert at the company and is eager to see how the four-legged helper fares on its maintenance tour. It starts literally on the ground.

I’m expecting the robot to deliver what it promises. BASF is testing a range of models from different suppliers. “ANYmal X” can be leased for around 8 thousand euros per month. First up, we’re going to these two points to look at the displays and then take a thermal image of the two pumps.

It detects the pressure display and then interprets the information. Once we look at the second one, we’ll see that it’s up and running. The first test involves ANYmal relaying another thermal image to the display which it does. It also passes test number 2: walking across a gridded floor. Now the ultimate challenge!

The robot has to scale these two sections of stairs fully autonomously. For potential client BASF this is the make-or-break test. Physically, it managed to hit those target locations and make its way up the stairs: a minor milestone for us! This canine is no cuddly companion made of metal and trained with AI,

It’s a fully-fledged guard and watch-dog. Malawi ranks among the poorest countries in the world. Intact roads are a rarity which hampers the provision of medical care especially in rural areas. While infant mortality is falling, it’s still ten times higher than in Germany, for example.

A delivery of medication has been prepared for a remote village. The drone is almost ready for take-off at the airfield outside Kasungu. So with the medicine now on board, the drone is about to take off vertically. And I’ll be driving to the village with Andi to see what a challenge that is.

It’s a direct comparison between how it used to be, and now with the drone. The car and drone will both be setting off from the Kasungu airfield. Their destination, is the village of Livwezi, around 48 kilometers away. The drone finds its destination via GPS coordinates. Tom Plümmer is joined by Andi Fisanich,

Wingcopter’s head of humanitarian programs The Wingcopter is a helicopter and small airplane in one. The vertical take-off brings the machine to its flying altitude of about 30 meters. Then the rotors tilt 90 degrees to propel the copter forwards, with lift provided by the wings just like a plane.

The only paved roads in Malawi are those connecting the main towns and cities. Once they leave them, Tom Plümmer and his team continue their journey on dirt tracks. Andi how is it? Is it still okay compared to what we will see? No. It will get worse. So, you are still relaxed?

This is still a good road? Yeah, this is still This is good. 15 minutes after starting out, the drone is just a few kilometers away from its destination. While the car is having serious trouble getting through the mud and potholes. The land route is clearly losing the race

As the car’s progress goes from slow to a complete halt. The delivery drone reaches its destination without incident and lands on schedule. It needed precisely 20 minutes for the 48-kilometer flight. In the same time, the car has not even covered half the distance and now it’s stuck!

This is like a river we could pass or a dead end? You know how deep the water is? OK, let’s go. Can we go and check, to see if there is a way around? Yeah, I think that will be best. Flooding is not uncommon during the rainy season

A potential disaster, if this were a medical emergency. Tom Plümmer is determined to continue his journey even though he’s lost the race against the Wingcopter. Back in Germany, in the port of Hamburg, we join a 30-strong research team working to save the oceans. Can you close 30 percent?

Could be 20 or 30 centimeters above the seabed The research project is called “SEACLEAR” a play on the words “clear view” and “clean sea.” Stefan Sosnowski and his international team have a boat packed with high-tech to help them clean up waters that are both murky and polluted.

We can find things and grab them with robots and these ones operate underwater. So why not use them to tackle this big problem of waste where other methods cannot help? The challenge for us is the extremely complex nature of the setup. You need everything to work together for

The entire system to function at all. We need at least some kind of solution that’s a genuine help because there’s far too much marine litter on the seabed. Marine debris washing up on beaches is a growing challenge for environmental activists. The vast majority of it is on the seabed

At depths too dangerous for divers. It’s estimated that there is far in excess of a hundred million tons of waste in our oceans. The SEACLEAR research team have successfully completed an initial trial-run here in Croatia. Robots able to work at depths of up to 500 meters can be used to clean the seabed

Near ports and coastlines, at least. After scanning the seabed and locating a spot with a lot of garbage, the boat drops a robot into the water to transmit close-up images. Additional data is provided by an air-borne surveillance drone. Another robot can then go and pick up the debris

And collect it in a waste basket. SEACLEAR is an EU-funded project that provides a small-scale demonstration of how the seabed might in future be cleaned up on a far larger scale. The trial run in Croatia was a success. In Hamburg the same technical setup faces a far tougher task.

The bottom of the River Elbe is covered in silt, sediment and mud, making garbage there often invisible to the naked eye. Even the cameras fitted onto the little diving robots struggle to see anything. In Croatia we had about 20 to 25 meters’ visibility here it’s 25 centimeters!

You can see here how we can’t even recognize objects that we’re practically right next to. So that doesn’t exactly make it any easier to find and identify things. The poor visibility means they must deploy an ultrasound scanner to search for objects. These two brighter spots are the two aluminum trays

Where we have stored the garbage. It’s now time for the robots to take over. The only thing the team can do now is operate the cameras. While the “mothership” puts the waste basket in place on the bottom of the river, the “observation robot” starts looking for debris with a camera and sonar.

Now a second robot fitted with a gripper is launched. Will it manage to find the bottle detected by the sonar? The gripper seems to be right over it. And it’s grabbed it. It’s gotten a firm hold on the bottle

So now we can get going and the system will place it in the basket. It’s a mammoth undertaking for one plastic bottle. The project is often a thankless task as is typical for research. Will the sediment prove too tough a challenge for the artificial intelligence? That could be the basket. Oh Light

We have the basket! Can you believe it? The gripper managed to find the waste basket despite being practically blind. Its next task is to locate the entry hole for depositing the bottle. The bottle’s moving and we’ve recovered it! We’ve just managed to grab the bottle at the first attempt

Which is great, because that’s a major milestone for our project. That gives us reassurance as we now see what else we can achieve. The future is eventually having these systems all over the world to clean up the sea and go some way to freeing it from the legacy of our sins.

The underwater trash collection system works regardless of visibility conditions. With no need for divers, the only human being required in future will be the person emptying the waste basket. Torrential rain in Malawi has rendered many roads impassable. Wingcopter boss Tom Plümmer and his team

Are still trying to reach the remote village of Livwezi by car but a usually tranquil little stream has flooded its banks. Can you check how deep it is? The water gets progressively deeper in the middle. Yeah, it’s too deep. OK, finished! There is no way.

The water is up to here on the lad. So the car probably won’t make it, and we’ll have to abort the journey. This is exactly why trying to deliver medicine quickly by car simply doesn’t work and why our drones are the perfect solution to the problem. On their way back to Kasungu,

The team take a short detour to the village of Linyangwa. Teresa Banda lives here with her four children. She experienced complications with the birth of her youngest son Philip a year ago. He was saved by help from the skies. My child almost suffocated at birth and I was extremely scared

He was going to die because we didn’t have a vital tube. But luckily help arrived just in time. Phillip had great difficulty breathing, and otherwise he would definitely have suffocated. The Wingcopter is a small miracle for the community of 150 people and a big blessing. The all-electric drone is unloaded by Mataka Macdonald,

Who runs the local healthcare center. It was he who made the emergency call for the tube to save Phillipp. The drone makes several visits a week to provide the doctor with medical supplies. A life-saver heaven sent. Tom Plümmer, himself the father of two children, is personally moved by the story of little Philipp.

Hello, nice to see you. You good? This is for you. So how is Philipp doing since he was born? Ok, so how is he now? She is saying that since he was born Philip is just ok. And he is just doing fine. And the breathing? His breathing is good?

Yes, he is just breathing normally. Philipp’s story shows exactly how effective our work is. In fact, when I founded Wingcopter seven years ago, this was exactly what I was hoping for: so that a child, like Philipp, can survive and be sitting here now.

His mother just said that she wants him to be a drone pilot when he grows up. And we do also train young people. So when he’s maybe 12 or older, he can start learning the technology and when he’s really grown up, I think he’ll be one of our brilliant employees here in Malawi.

Back at the Wingcopter hub, Tom Plümmer takes a video call from Switzerland. The World Economic Forum has awarded him the title of ‘Young Global Leader’ for his commitment to “actively addressing the world’s most pressing issues. Hello. I am happy to meet you all. I am in Malawi. This is where we operate

So I visited our site. You can see it in the background actually. If you want, I can show you if you like. Quickly. This title alone opens doors, because you’re recognized by a respected organization that does a lot of good work in the world.

So now we can suddenly sit down with ministers and say: what can we do for a country like Malawi? I would love to roll this out worldwide. So, my dream is to bring this kind of delivery service, which is in minutes life- saving, to any places in the world.

So, if we can team up on this, this is why I am delighted to be part of the YGL. To accelerate and scale this impact we have already here at small scale. Alright. Andi would you quickly introduce yourself and say what we are doing here? We have three hubs,

About 30 delivery sites and we have a team of nine pilots that are running the operations. So it’s really wonderful. Thank you. And I can show you the drones. It’s like a two-meter wingspan. Here you can put the batteries in and below is actually the payload.

And then, yeah, we have a whole airfield here. Tom is one of a hundred young people around the world to be commended in 2023 for their efforts to provide solutions to humanitarian or climate-related problems. You have to work with decision-makers, and make them aware of situations like this.

Both the suffering and the solution actually creating something that will change things in the long term. In today’s world, with all the modern means available, it’s unacceptable for some people to get nothing of what we have. We have really privileged lives in Germany. And when you come here and see what other people

Really don’t have, you think: can I not do more? It never leaves my mind. Dedicated humans joining forces with intelligent machines as they seek to eliminate hazards and save lives with high-tech help.

From drones supplying remote villages with medication to robots taking on dangerous jobs: smart technology is helping people to go higher, faster and further. When lives are at stake, high-tech can often outperform humans.

Tom Plümmer’s “Wingcopter” is half helicopter, half airplane. The drone with a two-meter wingspan has started delivering parcels in Germany and is already ferrying crucially needed medication supplies in Malawi. Drone stations being set up there by the inventor receive emergency calls from remote villages. The Wingcopters are then loaded up with vaccines, medication and other supplies before being guided via GPS to their destinations – which are difficult and time-consuming to reach by car.

Swiss engineer Péter Fankhauser built his first autonomous robot in 2018. “ANYmal” resembles a large, metal dog and learns continuously: climbing stairs, analyzing data from its thermal-imaging camera, and navigating its way through smoke with the help of laser sensors. That skill set makes it attractive for use in the chemical industry and oil and gas refineries with their vulnerability to accidents involving fires and explosions. “We can operate the plant safely and remove individuals from the danger area”, says the engineer. “In an indirect sense, the robot saves lives.” ANYmal is now set to demonstrate its talents at the world’s biggest chemical company.

Stefan Sosnowski and his fellow-researchers have custom-built a boat fitted with artificial intelligence and underwater robots to clear up the millions of tons of waste polluting the seabed – for humans, a risky environment to venture into. An initial deployment in Hamburg docks will determine the feasibility of “SeaClear” being used in challenging conditions elsewhere. “If we can make it here with the poor visibility underwater,” says Sosnowski, “then we’ll make it everywhere.”

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