Well-Cam

In the months following Operation Enduring Freedom, the war in Afghanistan, soldiers were tasked with finding weapons caches hidden by former Taliban forces. In Afghanistan, there is a long history of using wells as hiding places and so soldiers needed to inspect those too. The process originally involved having a man rappel down into the well while the rest of his squad stood guard at the top and helped to pull him out. It was a very slow process taking hours per well.

When an Exponent engineer working in Afghanistan witnessed this, he recognized that there was a better way. That night he went back to his lab, jury-rigged spare robot parts, and a broken DVD player into the first Well-Cam. The next day he went out with a squad of soldiers inspecting wells, it worked great. The time to inspect a well was cut down to five minutes. What’s more, on the first well they inspected the camera found a weapons cache.

The picture below shows the improved Well-Cam system.