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Ruiz ordered his unit to go through the building as carefully as possible. With guns drawn, and using their body armor as a pro- tective cocoon, SWAT members went through the apartment complex floor by floor. They found nothing. Then they came upon apartment 523. They saw a busted door and bullet casings . Officer Robot Ruiz figured Vargas was hiding in the apart- ment. Ruiz needed to gather as much infor- mation as possible, but he didn’t want to put his unit in harm’s way—yet. He ordered the deploy- ment of a four-wheeled robot armed with a cam- era and a mechanical arm. The robot was “the eyes of my team,” he’d say later. The remote-controlled bot slowly meandered into apartment 523 and looked around. Police watched on monitors. The robot moved through the hallway and stopped before reaching the dining room. Police

If technology can save lives, SWAT teams are all for it. Sometimes, they send a camera-equipped robot into a danger zone to show officers the way.

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