Spend Part of the $2 Trillion Infrastructure Plan on Robots

This week, the Democrats and President Trump are talking about a $2 trillion infrastructure plan, a number in line with American Society of Civil Engineers' estimates for infrastructure needs, but it isn't clear where the money will come from or if a bipartisan plan will actually move forward. Gas pipe repair robots allow utility crews in Boston, New York, and Edinburgh, Scotland, to finish a job in a third of the time, without digging up the street at every joint or interrupting service, because the robots can safely work inside pressurized lines. In Saudi Arabia and Mexico, water pipe inspection robots are inserted in one fire hydrant, carried by the water flow and captured with a net at another fire hydrant down the line, reporting the locations of leaks a tenth to a third the size old methods could find. In Fukushima, Japan, engineers have embarked on a half-century project one expert called more challenging than putting a man on the moon: designing and building robots that can operate in an extremely challenging environment to find, recover, and seal the lost radioactive fuel from the biggest nuclear plant disaster cleanup effort in history.