Monday, January 5, 2015

Harbour Bridge

Hello,

I hope everyone had wonderful holidays. Now we are ready to step into the New Year 2015. We are not leaving last year behind, we are taking the lessons learned in the previous years and adding to the new lessons from the year 2015.

That's enough of philosophy. During the winter vacation Sapna went to Australia to study the behavior of Marsupials for her biology class. She returned to the US and decided to learn robotics!

Happy New Year!

Meera


Harbour Bridge


Sapna unpacked her bags and took a couple of postcards from her folder to her sixteen-year-old brother, Sagar.

"Bhaiya, I saw the most fantastic bridge in the world."

"Oh, yeah? Got any pictures? Photos?"

"I have some on my cell phone but the battery is down. I have these postcards."

"Cool, let's see them."

"The pictures are okay, but I want to tell you about Rosey and Sandy."

"Who are they?"

Sapna sat next to Sagar's chair, "They both weigh 25 Kilograms each and are grit blasting robots who are permanently employed to clean the bridge, an enormous job! We saw them, albeit from a distance."

"Wow, sounds interesting."

Sapna continued, "Well this Harbour Bridge in Sydney is 53000 tons of steel with so many joints. You can see the Sydney Opera House from there. It looks so pretty at night. Of course we didn't get to see an opera."

"I thought you were telling me about a bridge."

"Oh, yeah, it's also called an arch bridge has lots of joints and old paint and rust on it. It took so long to build it .. starting in 1923 and completing in 1932. Anyway, blasting off the lead paint and rust is hazardous to human health, so instead of using humans with masks and protective covering, they are using Sandy and Rosey to do the job."

"Wow!"

"These robots have two meter long arms that can bend, turn, extend and clean the rivet nuts and these robotic arms go around, behind the six million rivets to remove the rust and paint."

"It appears to be bigger than the Mississippi in Memphis."

"They say it's 60 Sports fields, two miles long. Is a sports field longer than a football field Bhaiya?"

"I don't know, we can Google it."

"Anyway I have decided that my field of study after High School will be Robotics -- that's it, robotics for me."

"That's great, learn Japanese and you'll be able to study robotics even better 'cause the Japanese use thousands of robots for a lot of chores."

"Okay, Sayonara, Bhaiya, I am going to finish my unpacking."

 "Bye."


The End


© 2015, Meera Desai Shah