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This Robot Collects Fingerprints
Roland Piquepaille writes "When police officers found suspicious packages today in an airport or a train station, they destroyed them immediately, along with potential fingerprints on them. A new robotic device, dubbed RAFFE (short for "Robot Accessory for Fuming Fingerprint Evidence), developed by scientists from the University of Toronto (U of T) and the University of Calgary, offers a solution to this problem. Mounted on an ordinary robot, it will reveal fingerprints by releasing Super Glue on the object. Then it will take pictures of these fingerprints. The Calgary Police Service is already using RAFFE for field tests. This overview contains more details and extra references."
It isn't exactly the super glue, it is the cyanoacrylate fumes released from heating the glue. It turns the finger prints white, then they can be photographed.
The reason they don't have a human doing this work, is because it is a dangerous assignment, investigating a suspecious package. Normally the robot would just destroy the package, finger prints and all. Now they can make images of the prints before destroying the package.
Why do people keep calling remote controlled devices robots?
A robot is an autonomous object responding to its environment.
A remote controlled device is under direct control.
We call them
Remote Controlled Cars
Remote Controlled Planes
these are clearly not "ROBOTS".
Why are the more esoteric remote controlled devices called robots?
With all the crap patents we hear about in this forum, it's great to read about a simple, obvious invention that someone actually invented - an idea that's actually worth some real credit.
But it still makes me wanna kick myself for not thinking of it first.
No. At the very least it is littering.
If it's in you sig, it's in your post.
Or better yet, involve someone to handle the package for him/her, throwing the trail off?
This is only going to catch the dummies, who most likely have already blown themselves up.
It's a good point, but probably moot. Just because it's not admissible in court doesn't mean that the police/FBI can't use it to investigate the crime. And find such fingerprints would be more than sufficient probable cause to issue a search warrant, where (if the suspect is in fact guilty) admissible evidence can be found. At that point, the authenticity of the fingerprints really doesn't matter too much.
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
As a fellow Canadian, I find your post grovelling, pandering, and embarrasing. As another poster said: We have nothing to prove. This is just another academic advance from another of the world's research institutes, and it's rather pathetic to "see! We matter!" with it.
In any case, do you really think the far-right in the US, the people who will say and do whatever they want to support their pet projects, care about facts (this'll make em see the light)? Of course they don't. They care about promoting xenophobia, paranoia, and the illusion of safety. All to get some funding for the local military base, or the local tech center that's developing a massive big brother database, or whatever other number of slush fund contributors they need to appease. If that means creating an illusion of a complacent Canada because we don't jump everytime their narrowsighted, politically charged so-called-intelligence agencies uncreatively imagine a threat (usually be imagining the prior threat repeating), then that's a price they're will to make someone else pay.