Robots to secure South Korean Winter Olympics

Robots, drones and virtual reality will be part of a high-tech Winter Olympics hosted by South Korea in 2018.

“We are developing state-of-the-art technologies in the area of information technology,” Lee Hee-Beom, President of the 2018 Olympic organising committee told AFP.

Robots will help guard the games, while drones would also be used, he said. But security will not be the only high-tech area: “We are preparing lots of things,” he added, including virtual reality.

“We are aiming at a barrier-free Olympic Games so we will do our best to make it language barrier-free, age barrier-free, handicap barrier-free,” he said.

The government has already planned a US$60 million public safety robots project. Robots are being built to handle complex disaster rescue missions, including massive fires, explosions and chemical disasters.

Image by Republic of Korea, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0