Product Features

Honeybee Robotics is developing end-effectors for tactical robots. These end-effectors help enable detection of hidden Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and unexploded ordnance (UXO) in military, security, and law enforcement scenarios. These modular devices would operate at the end of a manipulator arm on general purpose mobile robots such as small unmanned ground vehicles (UGV); requiring no modification other than mounting the robot arm’s interface. These are compact, self-contained devices which leverage Honeybee’s experience designing rugged task-specific end-effectors with limited power and mass budgets.

Rapid Digging Tool

An impact hammer-actuated shovel that enables small UGVs to quickly dig into hard-packed soils (such as for roadside bombs) to uncover IEDs and their wires.

Door-Opening End-Effector

This manipulator dramatically improves a robot's ability to non-destructively breach doors and inspect a room's content, a capability that was previously out of reach of unmanned systems. Key features of the end effector are its compliant wrist and gripping surfaces, allowing the robot to move linearly while the doorknob follows an arc around the door hinges, and enabling a doorknob to be turned with a simple rotation of the gripper despite misalignment with the axis of the knob.

DrillCam - Integrated Drill and Borescope Camera

This is an arm-mounted tool for providing remote visual access to vehicles and other enclosed spaces. It consists of a drill, a slender camera, and an indexing pivot for switching between the two. The DrillCam can perform multiple penetrations and peeks on the same vehicle without needing operator intervention. The system connects to an EOD robot’s arm using clamps, which could just as easily be attached to a handle for manual operation by a technician in a bomb suit. The drill and the camera operate independently of each other, and either could be changed out for a different tool or sensor.