In the news today, adorable, and I'm not crying, you're crying, NDTL reports that an engineer in New Delhi named Milind Raj saved a puppy using a drone that equipped it with a giant claw .
Raj went out for a morning walk in New Delhi when he heard whimpering and tracked the sound towards a puppy that had gotten stuck in a swampy drain between two roads. Raj said the puppy's condition was "miserable" and he tells The Verge that the local residents had heard the animal crying for two days. Others had not dedicated themselves to the task of trying to rescue the puppy because "the drain was so dirty," says Raj. "It was not possible for a human to rescue the puppy without endangering his own life."
Raj decided to undertake the task himself and immediately went to work building a drone capable of rescuing the puppy. Although Raj has an extensive history in both AI and robotics, he said that building the right tools was a challenging exercise. In a few hours, he had tied a robotic arm with a claw to a drone of six rotors, both made to measure in his laboratory, located in the city of Lucknow. While he himself had built the drone two years ago, the arm that equipped it was something he created specifically for this rescue, installing sensors to track the heartbeat and breathing patterns to monitor the welfare of the puppy. "The AI helped me control the animal's heart rate," he said. "If the grip was too tight, the puppy would suffocate."
Once the drone was complete, he returned to the site. Raj says: "The puppy was traumatized and, therefore, did not react much," so he was able to maneuver a loop around the puppy's neck and securely lock the claw around his torso. In the video, you can see the drone lifting the small animal from the mud while looking around, completely perplexed by the situation. Operation Get The Poor Puppy Out Of The Ditch was a success
However, the story has an even better ending. Not only was he rescued, Raj decided to adopt the puppy, calling him Lifted. A natural conclusion since dogs are, after all, a choice of 10/10 each time.
