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A DAD WHO FOUGHT BACK -- When Brian Hart
lost his son
to a roadside ambush in Iraq, he channeled his
grief
into creating an affordable robot that defuses
bombs so the troops don't have to.
Brian Hart's LANDSHARK
Story here...
http://www.popsci.com/bow
n/article/2008-11/dad-who-fought-back?page=
Story below:
Comment at bottom of page.
-------------------------
A Dad Who Fought Back
When Brian Hart lost his son to a roadside ambush
in Iraq, he channeled his grief into creating an affordable robot that
defuses bombs so the troops don’t have to
By Cliff Kuang
“John was always into the military,” says Brian Hart. He and his wife,
Alma, were hoping their son would go to college, “but when 9/11 happened,
he was sure,” Hart recalls. “He wanted to serve.” John enlisted in
September 2002 at age 19, drawing a place in the 173rd Airborne Brigade.
By July, he was on the front line in Iraq and quickly realized that the
Army had come to war unprepared. “He called me and said, ‘Dad, we need
body armor. Can you help?’” The next week, October 18, 2003, John and his
commanding officer were killed in their unarmored humvee during a roadside
ambush.
After their son’s death, the Harts became the nation’s leading advocates
for better protective gear for the troops. When they started, less than 2
percent of all humvees had armor plating; today, virtually all of them do.
But Brian Hart didn’t stop at advocacy. With his brother Richard as chief
product designer and start-up capital from John’s military benefits, the
two founded Black-i Robotics.
 Their
mission is to make robots capable of destroying IEDs, like the ones
killing American troops. (Incredibly, it wasn’t the first time tragedy had
moved the brothers to action. In 1996 they developed a now widely used
bar-code tracking system for medicine after their father died from a
lidocaine overdose caused by inscrutable packaging.)
This year, Black-i Robotics came out with a wheeled robot called the
LandShark that can plow through soil to expose buried bombs and uses jets
of water to detonate them. One was delivered to Boston’s Logan Airport in
November to detonate suspected car bombs. Another will ship out to either
Afghanistan or Iraq next year, part of a $800,000 contract with the U.S.
Department of Defense.
Despite the early success, the Harts’ company remains a scrappy operation.
That’s by design: Unlike competitors such as Foster-Miller and iRobot,
which have offices nearby and sit on more than $500 million in contracts,
Black-i Robotics has almost no overhead. The company’s headquarters, if
you could call it that, is set in a strip of low-rent offices in
Tyngsboro, Massachusetts.
The modest setup takes aim at spendthrift contractors and a lumbering
military-procurement system. “Big contractors won’t wash their hands
without a contract,” Hart says. “They can’t work like we do.” The
LandShark is a humble rig fashioned from motors, off-the-shelf computers,
a car battery and even an Xbox controller. Fully loaded, it costs less
than $70,000—50 percent cheaper than its competitors. The more affordable
the robot, the faster it can be made and the more likely it is to reach
the front lines and save lives, Hart says. “That’s John’s legacy.”
The LandShark was named one of PopSci's top 100
innovations of the year. Read about it here, where you can also check out
all of Best of What's New 2008.
http://www.popsci.com/bown/2008/product/landshark
-------------------------
posted by Larry Scott
Founder and Editor
VA Watchdog dot Org
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