Or an attempt could be made to mend the hull by sealing the cracks using a robot.
They don't have a second thought about the fact that they're using a robot to perform a task.
Surgeons at a Scottish hospital are using a robot to help carry out knee operations, BBC Scotland can reveal.
Police say they are still looking for the weapon used during the attack, using a robot to search a nearby estuary.
Last year, researchers published a video of a paralyzed woman using a robot arm to feed herself chocolate by thinking about it.
The practical applications of using a robot to weave a structure is that it could become a deployable platform capable of building a large structure, like say a gantry platform inside or around another large structure.
Using a laser, the robot can make highly accurate welds and position itself for each one a lot faster than it could if it were spot-welding in the normal way.
For his swarm-search strategy, Kisdi envisions using a rolling, jumping robot, Jollbot.
New Cross Hospital hopes to carry out 30 mitral valve repairs a year using the robot that is already employed in other operations at the hospital.
He said that the PSNI inspected the vehicle using a remote controlled "wheelbarrow" robot and found two gas cylinders, a length of wiring and a car battery.
Nicolelis and colleagues have shown that a rhesus monkey in North Carolina could, using only its brain, control the walking patterns of a robot in Japan.
Researchers have tackled the problem by linking the robot to a navigation system using ultrasound.
But Nekton Research, a company based in Durham, North Carolina, has developed a robot fish called Madeleine that manoeuvres using fins instead.
By plotting perceived humanness along the horizontal axis and eeriness along the vertical, Dr MacDorman says that he can recreate Dr Mori's chart of the uncanny valley, this time using real data about how people feel about a particular robot or animation.
The first of those took place last July, when Abderrahmane Kheddar, director of the CNRS-AIST joint robotics laboratory at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba, Japan, and his team used FMRI to allow someone to control a robot located thousands of miles away using only their thoughts.
Using so-called reality instant messaging, a software "robot" monitors what you and your friends are doing--watching the same TV shows on different sets, say, or downloading the same song from Eminem--and links all of you via cell phone.
Using a phone snapped into the top of the head, the robot reacts to your interaction with it via camera and a wand attachment that sits in Atti's hand while not in use.
At the moment I'm concentrating on using vegetation like a cow, rather than building a meat-eating robot.
By using two air muscles to pull a joint in different directions, the robot hand is capable of strong and precise actions.
ECONOMIST: Mechanical hand seeks dangerous, dirty and dull jobs
The robot was programmed to create a data-point cloud using a traditional sonar scan.
The innovation - which pairs a GPS-equipped smartphone with a robot arm - can guide engineers to the right location using augmented reality.
To work around these problems, Dr Hover came up with the idea of using the data-point cloud not to spot mines, but as a guide to help the robot take a closer look at the hull.
Japanese company Sohgo Security Services has developed the "Guardrobo D1, " a meter-tall robot that can patrol offices, homes or stores, watch for trouble using digital cameras and sensors, and alert human guards via radio if it detects a problem.
As a result, some teams have decided to skip the building robot bugs, and are instead working on using bugs themselves.
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