At the centre of all this are the Daiichi workers—those unlucky enough to have the task, limited to a few moments at a time, of labouring inside the debris-strewn reactor buildings. With radiation high enough to sabotage electronics, American robots donated to the Daiichi plant have been missing in action, along with a Japanese robot dubbed Quince. Human labor for some of the most dangerous tasks has had to substitute.
"Untrained casual laborers used dustpans to scoop up highly radioactive water into buckets; dashing in and out of doors to reduce their exposure times," says local Fukushima councillor Hiroyuki Watanabe who is studying Daiichi workers and acts as an unofficial spokesman for them. Says one anonymous worker "for all of Japan's high-tech prowess, none of those lauded humanoid helpers were any good at all," referring to Japan's robot programs.
TEPCO and the Japanese government are scrambling now to get some stronger mechanical help into the stricken reactors, calling on the expertise of disaster robot specialists at Technology's Future Robotics Technology Center (fuRo) at the University of Chiba.
But it seems too little, too late. For years much of Japan's robot research and development—billions of dollars worth—was aimed at developing humanoid helpers for the home derided by some as toys, not practical robots like those from fuRO. With authorities prioritising factory and helper humanoids to do the work immigrants do elsewhere in the world, more useful robotics were marginalised.
"The Japanese like to put a face on things, to make them look like a humans or animals. It's more done for entertainment value than real practicality," says Joseph Engelberger the "father of the robotics industry" on Japan's robots. "They should be able to do more."
2-2
