FIFA World Cup in Brazil will be guarded by robots, drones and policemen with face recognition glasses

The American company iRobot, which produces not only the popular Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners, but also a line of semi-autonomous military robots, last week signed a $ 7.2 million contract with the Brazilian government to supply and service 30 PackBot 510 robots to work during the World Cup 2014 football championship. These robots worked well in Afghanistan and Iraq and helped to liquidate the consequences of the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. The main purpose of PackBot is the detection and disposal of bombs and dangerous substances, reconnaissance and surveillance in dangerous and inaccessible places.

Over the years of service in hot spots, a relative of a peaceful American vacuum cleaner has acquired an impressive set of accessories and components - a variety of cameras and spotlights, a portable chemical laboratory for detecting explosive and toxic substances, manipulators that can reach objects at a height of more than two meters, wire cutters, a water gun for safe destruction explosive devices, a device for breaking car windows, a rich set of communication equipment for all occasions.

The robot chassis allows you to move at a speed of about 10 km / h, overcome steps and slides with a slope of up to 60 degrees, roll over after falls. It can work in any weather and overcome water obstacles with a depth of less than a meter. The robot can go on a given route using GPS. In order to ensure stable radio communication in hard-to-reach places, several robots can join the network, transmitting a signal through each other, special intermediate radio modules that the robot can install on the route serve for the same purpose. If the connection still breaks, he automatically retreats back along the same path that he took until the connection is restored.

To control the robot, there is a special laptop and a controller similar to a game one. A fully equipped robot weighs 25-30 kg and costs 100 - 200 thousand dollars, depending on the set of accessories and manipulators. On the iRobot website you can download a PDF with detailed specifications of the robot and a catalog of accessories.

The seven-million contract with iRobot is just a tiny fraction of the budget allotted for securing the World Cup. In total, one billion seven hundred million dollars will be spent on these purposes . The money will go both for the purchase of quite familiar equipment: video cameras, police helicopters, metal detectors and the like, as well as for some other high-tech innovations. So, four drones "Hermes 450" Israeli productionwill be aerial surveillance in June this year, during the 2013 Confederations Cup, which also takes place in Brazil.



Brazil is already using these drones to patrol the borders. " Hermes 450 " can be located in the air to twenty hours. Although according to some reports, it can carry air-to-ground missiles, its main purpose is observation, reconnaissance and communications.

Another innovation - Brazilian cops will have Ex-Eye glasseswith camcorders, a display like Google Glass, and Intel Atom-based laptops connected to a wireless network that will record videos, recognize faces and look for matches in a database of millions of criminals, terrorists and football hooligans. This will greatly speed up and simplify the work of the police. Brazilian television compares the cops in these glasses with Robocop:



The system developer is the Israeli company Ex-Sight . The system can work with any video camera, as long as they give a picture in a fairly high resolution - the distance between the eyes should be at least 40 pixels. In a few tenths of a second, the faces that fall into the frame are recognized, and for each of them a “fingerprint” is created containing biometric characteristics. Each such print takes only 2.4 kilobytes, which allows you to quickly scan large databases. In addition to faces, the system can recognize car numbers.