POSITION & HOLD Robots take to the sky An imminent plethora of
UAVs, big and small, will have implications for existing and
future users of the NAS. By Marvin Cetron Pres, Forecasting Intl
Flying wing concept from British company VTOL Technologies
offers the speed and payload of conventional UAVs with 3–4 times
the endurance. It's small, it's cheap (at least on the scale of
high tech), and it's going where no man has gone in 4500 years.
It is a "tomb-bot"—a tracked robot designed by engineers at the
University of Leeds, in England, to drill through a door in the
Great Pyramid at Giza. The door is in one of 2 shafts leading
out of the Queen's Chamber. Archaeologists discovered the shafts
in 1872. Nearly 140 years later, no one knows where they go. In
1992, a camera sent up one of the shafts found a limestone door
blocking it some 60 meters in. Ten years later, another
expedition drilled through the door—and found another door, just
8 inches further on. It is this door that the tombbot is
intended to penetrate.