A Facebook friend shared a touching article today. It was about Scooby Doo, an EOD robot, having met its maker after 19 successful missions. In 2007 it was destroyed beyond repair in Iraq while attempting to defuse an improvised explosive device (IED).
Read the Gizmodo article here. Enjoy the comments section, where readers are debating the tradition of EOD personnel giving names and military ranks to their robots.
What fascinated me is that the company that manufactured Scooby Doo -- and dozens of others like it -- is the same company that has brought us the Roomba and the Scooba: iRobot!
Scooby Doo now resides at the iRobot corporate headquarters museum in Bedford, Massachusetts. Complete with a plaque. Visitors can see Scooby Doo's headpiece marked with 19 tick marks, one for every life-saving mission.
Learn more about Scooby Doo itself.
Learn more about iRobot's life-saving robots.
Learn more about the military's use of robots in life-saving roles through the G4 series Bomb Patrol: Afghanistan. Love love love that an XBox controller is used to control the military robots -- if it's familiar for most servicemembers, why not?