Grief leads father to make a bomb-defusing robot

By MARK JEWELL

Massachusetts

July 6: The knock on Brian Hart’s door came at 6 am. An Army colonel, a priest and a police officer had come to tell Hart and his wife that their 20-year-old son had been killed when his military vehicle was ambushed in Iraq.

Mr Brian Hart didn’t channel his grief quietly. Committed to "preventing the senseless from recurring," he railed against the military on his blog for shortcomings in supplying armour to soldiers.

The one-time Republican teamed with liberal Senator Edward Kennedy to tell Congress that the Pentagon was leaving soldiers ill-equipped. And then Mr Hart went beyond words to fight his cause. He became a defence contractor. He founded a company that has developed rugged, relatively inexpensive robotic vehicles, resembling small dune buggies, to disable car bombs and roadside explosives before they detonate in hot spots like Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now, Mr Hart has won over the military brass he so harshly criticises. Three years after starting Black-I Robotics Inc, he and his four employees won a $728,000 contract from the Pentagon in June to further develop the "LandShark" robot. Technology to protect troops is a subject uncomfortably close to home for Mr Hart, who says the death of his son, John Hart, left him in "total devastation."

Mr Brian Hart can’t forget the call he got from his son in Iraq a week before he was killed by a gunshot on October 18, 2003.

"He asked me to help him: `Get us body armour and vehicular armour,’" Mr Hart said. "He thought he’d be killed on the road in an unarmoured Humvee. And a week to the day later, he was."

The Pentagon contract requires Black-I to supply three of its six-wheeled, electric-powered vehicles this year and provide support. The military will test two units, while Boston’s Logan airport will get one for bomb-disposal duties. If tests go well, soldiers in Iraq could be using the robots as soon as 2009, Mr Hart says.

His company is also trying to secure an additional $1.5 m in Pentagon funding next fiscal year. At 275 pounds and about four feet long, Black-I’s LandShark looks like a dune buggy without a seat for a human driver. Mr Hart hopes to make them available for commercial sale to law enforcement in 2009, with expectations that the cost would be $65,000-$85,000 per robot, including the chassis and add-on bomb-disposing equipment.

The vehicle can pull tilling equipment to plow up soil where an explosive or trip wire may be hidden. Or it can drop off "disrupters" that can be maneuvered near a bomb and set off, with jets of water disabling the bomb.

Mr Hart contends LandSharks will be far less expensive than many of the Pentagon’s current bomb-disposing robots, including models made by two larger Boston-area companies, iRobot Inc and Foster-Miller Inc. Those models have more sophisticated electronics, but also are more fragile than LandSharks, which use car batteries rather than lighter and pricier lithium-ion batteries. Mr Hart wants to make the robots affordable. —AP