SENDAI - A technical college in Sendai has developed a self-propelled robot equipped with ground-penetrating radar, which it recently deployed to search for four elementary school children missing since the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake.
The search was carried out Sunday on the coast of Miyagi Prefecture, at the request of Miho Suzuki, 54 whose daughter Hana went missing from the disaster as a fourth grader at Okawa Elementary School.
It's OK to take some time, but I want to find Hana at any cost, Suzuki said, watching over the search, her face fixed as though in prayer.
Prof. Jun Sonoda, 52, of the National Institute of Technology Sendai College, converted a snowplow to build the 120 centimeter-long, 70 centimeter-wide, 70 centimeter-tall robot. Its continuous tracks allow it to travel over rocky terrain, and it can accurately locate itself using the global positioning system.
The latest search was conducted on a 200 meter stretch of sandy beach near the Nagatsura bathing beach on the east side of the elementary school, with ground-penetrating radar used to scan 1 meter down. The volunteers plan to dig up and examine buried objects in mid-April, and there were detected at about 10 locations.
Sonoda developed a hand-pulled device equipped with ground-penetrating radar and began conducting searches in Natori, Miyagi Prefecture and Rikuzentakata, Iwate Prefecture in 2013. In 2021 he produced a self-propelled robot with tires, a build that would go through four more iterations before being deployed for Sunday s search.
So far, Sonoda's successive robots have found about 30 items, including hats and shoes with names on them. A data set has been created of 100,000 items that are not personal effects or remains that contain information on object size and shape to increase the odds of an important find. This allows artificial intelligence to determine what an item is while it is still buried, and frees up search parties to dig only in promising spots.
Since the disaster 12 years ago, Suzuki has gone to the beach near her daughter's school once or twice a month to dig for signs of Hana, but she had felt that it would be nearly impossible to turn over the whole beach by hand.
After Sunday s search, Suzuki said she was happy to hear that the robot picked up multiple hits. Sonoda said that twelve years have passed since the earthquake, and fewer people are volunteering for searches. I hope to contribute to searches by building a robot that can dig by itself. This summer, the robot is scheduled to search for those who went missing during the Mt. In September 2014, an ontake eruption occurred in Nagano and Gifu prefectures.