Albuquerque — An emergency landing at the Albuquerque Sunport has bomb squad teams on standby after and attempted hijacking of a Boeing 747. Now, all that remains onboard is one dead terrorist, two live bombs, and a robot sent in to diffuse the situation.

This is not the plot of the latest film production; it’s a scenario from the Robot Rodeo.

The event, hosted between Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) for the past three years, tests the skills and patience of bomb squad crews from all over New Mexico. Last Thursday Santa Fe and APD Bomb Squad crews, along with teams from Kirtland Air Force Base and both Sandia and LANL, competed in several different events to push their robots to the max.

“Anyone can drive on a flat surface and shoot something,” said Mike Padilla, a Hazmat Emergency Resources Specialist. “You have to think through the robot — you lose depth perception. This is how [Bomb Squads] keep proficient in what they do.”

Each of the ten events posed a different challenge, one of which was to board a Boeing 747 airplane. Getting on the plane presents a unique obstacle even before beginning the search for explosives. Teams had to maneuver their robots down an arroyo to look for trip wires, traversing sandy soil and dense vegetation.

“It gives them that police training, which is really what it’s all about. This is something that any bomb team could encounter at any time,” Padilla said.

These robots, which are the actual equipment the bomb squads use every day, have a multitude of uses, such as hazardous material clean-up, hostage negotiations, or just surveillance of a dangerous situation.

“We send the robot in first. Robots are expendable,” he said.

They provide safe alternatives to disarming a bomb, where previously, disposal teams would use a heavily armored suit to manually disengage the bomb, a practice that is still used as a last resort.

“We use [robots] quite a bit,” said Detective Lawrence Vasquez with the Santa Fe Police Department.

In a world going wireless, many of these machines use a fiber optic cable hard line hooked up to a computer. While the robots are capable of going wireless in the field, the fiber optic cable allows for crystal clear video images. It also is much more secure than wirelessly transmitting, leaving no room for a hacker to pull images from the robot or take control of it.

In Iraq, roadside bombs use radio signal detonators, meaning that a robot with the same signal may inadvertently detonate the device, making fiber optics key in some instances.