A robot recruit joins the street sterilisation campaign in Abu Dhabi…

Many of us have taken on new roles in the ongoing pandemic.

Parents have become home tutors, and fine-dining restaurants have reinvented themselves as luxury food delivery services, but it’s a trend perhaps best exemplified by the team of residents that have volunteered to join the sterilisation effort.

And it’s not just the humans pitching in with their transferrable skills.

Some of Abu Dhabi Civil Defense’s core of futuristic-looking equipment, which was originally rolled out to tackle fires, has now been redeployed as virus-fighting tech in the National Disinfection Programme.

Equipped with swivel-mounted high-pressure jets, the fleet of special trucks looks impressively ‘Transformer’ enough, but in a recent video dropped on Abu Dhabi Police’s Twitter, we get a glimpse of another driverless robo-contraption.

 

What’s On did a bit of digging for the tech geeks among you and it looks like this particular bit of kit is an AirCore TAF35 – a fire-fighting land drone, created by German engineering firm Magirus.

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And the machine shows off some impressive stats – it’s capable of getting in quite a lather, projecting liquid or foam at a rate 3,500 litres/minute.

It comes fully loaded with a remote control function and the nozzle jets have a maximum range of 80 metres.

All of which makes it an excellent candidate for the disinfection duty.

The video also shows Abu Dhabi Civil Defense working alongside the Abu Dhabi Center for Waste Management, with the slogan “hand in hand”.

There is no doubt that the best effort to conquer the Covid-19 threat is a collaborative one, whether it’s between agencies and institutions, or man and machine.

Images: Twitter