![\"\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/2PhantomAndros.JPG.jpg\")
After exploring the simulated crash site, this robot looks for possible objectives hidden elsewhere in the vicinity. (Kelsey D. Atherton)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/li> ![\"\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/3MTGRPhantom.JPG.jpg\")
As part of the Western National Robot Rodeo, this robot looked for possible mock-explosives hidden in a crashed F-4 Phantom. (Kelsey D. Atherton)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/li> ![\"\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/1Watercutter.JPG.jpg\")
As part of the Robot Rodeo, the New Mexico State Police bomb squad is using this robot to try and slice a shape through this sheet of aluminum. (Kelsey D. Atherton)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/li> ![\"\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG_1484.JPG.jpg\")
Driving between the two halves of the wrecked plane, the robot pokes around for clues about suspected mock explosives. (Kelsey D. Atherton)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/li> ![\"\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/4MTGR-Handstand.JPG.jpg\")
The Robot Rodeo provides a safe environment for EOD teams to explore novel techniques, like pointing all the cameras down into dirt. (Kelsey D. Atherton)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/li><\/ul><\/a><\/a><\/a> <\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\nThe EOD team on the ground was from Kirtland\u2019s own 377th Air Base Wing. To poke through the wreckage, the 377th piloted an F-6 Andros from Remotec, and a smaller MTGR from Roboteam. With just 90 minutes to locate the explosives, the machines moved as quickly as their bodies allowed, but not so quickly that they would break during the training. Robots like this run about $100,000 on the smaller side, and the bigger robots come close to half a million. When dealing with a real threat, that\u2019s a price worth paying to keep a human out of danger, but it\u2019s a lot to risk on a training exercise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the time I and other assembled media spent watching the 377th poke around the Phantom, the team had yet to locate any of the objective packages. Some of this was the scale of the task: objects were hidden out of sight and in strange places. Another part is the simple limitation of the machines. The F-6 has a single arm with a camera mounted on the limb. Hunting through scraps means staring down a pinhole mounted roughly around the elbow. The MTGR has more cameras; at one moment one of those cameras poked up on a stalk to peer around the wing, like R2-D2 inspecting an X-Wing. In another moment, the little robot appeared to do a handstand, with the cameras pointed squarely at the dirt. I\u2019m not sure how much those cameras aided visibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On another part of the base, the bomb squad from the New Mexico State Police was learning how to use a water cutter. One feature of the Robot Rodeo is the presence of invited vendors. The vendors typically provide lunch for the people competing, and in addition offer possible new robot accessories for the teams to try out. In this case, the accessory was a high-powered pressure cutter, and the goal of the bomb squad was to try and cut specific patterns through a target aluminum sheet. After the challenge, the cut sheet would provide the team its report card, showing how ably a robot was maneuvered to slice through a rectangle, or a circle, or a star. As spelled out, the scenario here was creating a way into a vehicle where the obvious latch might be booby-trapped. Rather than open a rigged trunk switch, an alternative path in might save lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
During the part of the demonstration I witnessed, the pressure cutter blasted water through aluminum well enough, though we didn\u2019t stick around long enough to see if the officers controlling the robot were able to cut the shapes they needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the other nine scenarios were off-limits for media, Jake Deuel, Sandia robotics manager and Robot Rodeo coordinator, described a few. \u201cThe Long Way\u201d was an obstacle course. \u201cRecon Rally\u201d is an remote control car competition, done in conjunction with multiple teams of robotics students, to see if cheaper, simpler remote control cars can scout out possible threats for the more sophisticated robots to tackle later. In a bomb rich environment, using cheap machines for the initial scouting might make sense, since cheaper robots mean more tolerable failures, should the machine run into a tripwire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cKamikaze\u201d was the most interesting scenario not on display. Deuel envisioned a commercial transport of explosives, suddenly attacks by some nefarious actor at a major highway interchange. Only this attack would feature commercial drones, cheap quadcopters modified to carry explosives, creating a tremendous mess. For the bomb squads competing in this challenge, the assumption was something like cleaning up the aftermath: a flatbed with some explosive cargo remaining, surrounded by a field of downed drones, potentially still rigged to blow up. When I visited the Robot Rodeo in 2013<\/a>, commercial drones as both tools and threat was still an idea in its infancy. Since then, we\u2019ve seen quadcopters modified to drop grenades and scratch-built drones with explosives inside kill an EOD tech<\/a> attempting to demine it. The rodeo has adapted somewhat to the new threat environment, creating a challenging but safe way for the people tasked with dismantling explosives to learn how to do so in novel situations, far from the pressures and dangers of combat itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThis is training you can\u2019t get anywhere else,\u201d said Gabriel Luna, a sergeant with the New Mexico State Police bomb squad. It\u2019s also a way to learn the robot\u2019s deficiencies, he noted, pointing out the wear and tear on the squad\u2019s F6A, which the state police have had since 2004.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Though it had been half a decade since I last witnessed the competition, the robots struck me as similar to the point of identical. When I asked about the pace of change in robot design, Deuel said it was slow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThere\u2019s more change in accessories,\u201d said Deuel, \u201cand in the software.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Adding pressure-sensitive feedback allowed the robots to display the position of their various appendages on the screens the operators used to control the robots, making it less likely that a robot would get stuck somewhere because the person in charge didn\u2019t know where the limbs were.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The challenge also allows engineers who work on robot design to see user frustration in real time, and to see use cases for the machines they may never have imagined. Watching robots struggle over real stairs, or wobble when driving over scrapped wings, can inform the next generation of robots, and in turn keep both the present and the next generation of bomb squad officers alive. When the robots fail, there\u2019s always the possibility of sending in a human in the suit, but everyone I spoke to wanted to keep the suit as a last resort. Someday, should the robots become capable enough, the bomb suit may be as much a relic as the scattered remains of the Phantom.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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