One-armed ‘MAC’ joins Makati police
By Marlon Ramos
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 05:09:00 10/15/2008
Filed Under: Technology (general), Robotics, Police, Security (general)
MANILA, Philippines—The bomb squad of the Makati City police on Tuesday welcomed its most fearless recruit—a one-armed, two-foot tall, chemical-sensitive, night-seeing robot named “MAC.”
And it’s made of parts mostly sourced from Quiapo.
MAC—short for “mechanical antiterrorist concept”—is a 100-percent Filipino-made gizmo to be deployed next time the city that hosts the country’s financial center and a number of foreign embassies comes under threat of another big bang.
“With MAC around, families of policemen will be assured that their loved ones will come home alive,” said John Judilla, one of the robot’s creators from the Mapua Institute of Technology.
“MAC will make our job safer. He will take on assignments which could endanger the lives of our policemen,” Senior Supt. Gilbert Cruz, the Makati police chief, said during MAC’s unveiling at a park fronting the Glorietta 4 mall.
The robot comes equipped with four cameras, all capable of night vision, and moves around on four rubber wheels. Its mechanical arm—which gives MAC an almost scorpion-like form—can safely handle explosive materials as heavy as 20 kilos or as thick as four inches.
The whole system runs on a rechargeable, 12-volt battery and only requires one human operator who can control MAC’s movements by cable from a safe distance of up to 300 meters.
The 80-kilogram MAC is mainly encased in fiber glass, with a body width of about two by three feet.
For Cruz, the investigation of the Oct. 19, 2007, blast at Glorietta 2—which officials insisted to have been caused by an industrial accident and not by a terrorist attack—could have been easier if MAC was already around at the time.
This is because MAC can also “measure the toxicity of the air during a chemical explosion,” Cruz said.
Before MAC can see action in the field, however, its creators led by Judilla will be bringing it to Shanghai today to enter the robot in the First World Cup on Computer-Implemented Inventions.
Judilla said MAC was actually the fourth robot his team had created for the armed services. The Mapua engineers earlier developed three “automated gunners” for Philippine Navy warships.
Cruz said the Makati police force was the first local law enforcement unit to employ robotics. The officer, who counts himself as a fan of sci-fi movies and the Discovery Channel, said he thought of deploying robots to better deal with recurring “bomb scares” in the city.
He said his bomb disposal unit was in response to an average of two bomb threats a week, Makati being home to a number of foreign embassies and corporate headquarters.
In a month, Cruz said, his men usually recover at least eight “devices”—either real bombs or dummies.
When a friend told him about a group of robotic engineers from Mapua, Cruz said, he immediately contacted Judilla, the former head of the university’s mechanical engineering department.
“Fortunately, they were also eager to embark on the project when I told them about it,” Cruz told the Philippine Daily Inquirer (parent company of INQUIRER.net).
Since the Philippine National Police did not have funds to bankroll such projects, Cruz looked for private sponsors, particularly among companies located in the city. In a matter of weeks, he received pledges from Philippine Airlines, San Miguel Corp.—and the Makati City government.
Cruz said at least P300,000 have already been spent on MAC, which Judilla described to be a work in progress.
Judilla said his team took about nine months to design and build MAC. “We can proudly say that this robot is completely Filipino-made,” he said.
Most of the components were bought from that famous row of electronics shops in Quiapo and Raon in Manila, he added.
“We’re still developing some of MAC’s added features. We might replace MAC’s tires with (trolley wheels) so he can walk up the stairs,” Judilla said. “This lightweight robot can easily be transported and used anywhere.”
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