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They go where we fear to tread

If we are to believe Hollywood, robots will one day rise up and enslave all of humanity. But in the meantime, they’re doing an awful lot to keep us safe. Whether they’re recovering an undetonated bomb from a car in Times Square on May 1, 2010, (left) or going deep under water to activate a cutoff valve on an oil-drilling platform, robots often take the place of humans and do the dangerous, dirty work we don’t want to do. Here’s a look at some of our favorite robotic friends.

Safe in Their Arms

In the 1940s, General Electric introduced robotic hands to handle radioactive substances that are potentially harmful. Here, GE designer John Payne demonstrates how the hands work, in one of the first instances of robots taking humans out of harm’s way.

Fearless Felix'

One of the Los Angeles Police Department’s first robots was nicknamed “Fearless Felix”; its job was to retrieve suspected explosives and get them to a safe location so they could be disabled. These days, robots are used by law-enforcement agencies across the country to remove bombs; a prominent example is the case of the failed car-bomb attack on Times Square in early May 2010. Here, Detective Arleigh McCree shows Felix off to the world in 1984.

Bots in Space

Extravehicular Activity Retrievers are designed to keep NASA’s moonwalkers safe by rescuing them if they get into trouble while outside the ship. Remotely controlled by astronauts, the free-flying EVA Retrievers can also repair hard-to-reach areas of a space station. In this 1988 photograph, a NASA engineer poses with the robot.

Training Day

From Iraqi war zones to the streets of Albuquerque, N.M. bomb-disposal robots like the one being tested in this 1997 photograph are tasked with not only removing the bombs, but getting rid of them through disablement or detonation, while humans keep a safe distance. In the image at left, a bomb explodes after being set off by a robot in a demonstration at the Albuquerque Police Academy.