Photos: Robots to the rescue

Robots with names like Eyeball, Dragon Runner, ToughBot, Marv, Matilda and Talon fearlessly rolled and hovered over wreckage and rubble last week in Disaster City, a 52-acre training center affiliated with Texas A&M University.

The center, operated by the university's Texas Engineering Extension Service (TEEX), opened in 1997 to train the state's emergency response forces and firefighters and rescue workers from all over the world.

Last week's robotics exercise, the fourth in two years sponsored by the Science and Technology Directorate at the Department of Homeland Security and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) at the Commerce Department, has a complex task: finding ways of evaluating performance of robots so that they can be fairly compared, according to The New York Times.

Here, Matilda, built by Mesa Robotics, waits patiently in her operations tent at Disaster City in College Station, Texas. The 61-pound robot can carry twice her weight in payload and is equipped with audio-video feeds and chemical, biological and radiological sensors, according to TEEX.