A three-person Squishy Robotics team has returned from almost a week of extensive testing assessing the resiliency of the communications of our sensors in operationally relevant environments at Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service (TEEX), Disaster City. This TEEX-tested effort was funded through our National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) – Public Safety Communications Research grant for continued user testing with our public safety agency partners Southern Manatee Fire & Rescue (SMFR), San Jose Fire Department (SJFD), and TEEX.

Southern Manatee Fire & Rescue (SMFR), a Squishy Robotics pilot partner since 2020, is well-known within the fire service for being a leader in the integration of new technologies for HazMat response. Such technologies must be safe to operate in even the most extreme of environments.

With the tag line, “there’s more space in your life than you think,” Spinoff profiles technologies that got their start because of NASA investment and support.  In Spherical Robots to the Rescue, the publication explains how NASA Early Stage Innovations (ESI) funding for spherical robots that could explore planetary and lunar surfaces led to disaster response tensegrity robots that provide situational awareness to first responders on Earth.