The CERN Robot Workforce

It might look like I'm using my Jedi powers to control a droid, but in reality, I'm at CERN in Switzerland and I'm in their robotics lab. This is where they build the robots to help them with their high energy experiments. This is a mock up of the beamline, and this is used to test out their robots. The beam line is where they fire high energy particles at each other underground. And this isn't a safe environment for humans because of radiation. So instead we can send in robots, which we can control remotely, which was what I was doing here. This robot's got wheels, which lets it move in every direction, even sideways, like a crab. So these can be controlled with a keyboard or with a gamepad, or even through this augmented reality display. This robot has a spinning lidar scanner that builds a 3D model of the room it's in, and it can fit through small holes. And this one runs on a rail and can reach all around the beam line. It's got a radiation detector which monitors radiation levels after the beam is turned off, to see when it's safe for humans to come back into the tunnels. If you want to find out more, check out my map of Particle Physics video and poster on YouTube.