Geo Radar Robot

[Turtle]

A guy in Chile built this robot & makes the claim it is capable of finding mineral, bodies, & what have you at depths of hundreds of feet.

Originally Posted by nationalgeographic.com

In September 2005 Salinas announced that he had found gold and buried treasure on the Juan Fernÿndez Islands—also known as the Robinson Crusoe islands—off the coast of Chile .

I might have put this is Strange Claims, but I found a National Geographic article on it.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...22-robots.html

[alexander]

darn, so now i can't just burry the weapons, i gotta burry them to over a few hundred feet deep? that wont make my taking the world over again as simple of a task...

[CraigD]

It’d be nice if Salinas would drop the “industry secret” line a little, and be a bit more direct in saying just what his machine is and is not.

The brand “Geo-radar” implies that it’s some sort of ground-penetrating RADAR. The account of “Arturito” being used to find a body hidden under a few meters of concrete suggest this – GPR, a pretty mature technology, while it can only effectively penetrate about a meter of wet soil, can penetrate over a dozen meters of dry, porous materials like concrete – several times the depth of the body Arturito found. This is not to downplay its potential goodness – a robot that can systematically use a GPR all day with little human supervision is a great idea, and an big improvement on the manually-positioned ones I’ve seen used.

Salinas also says his machine “searches for materials based on their atomic composition”, which sounds a lot like some sort of MRI, or maybe some kind of acoustic imaging. MRI is good for nowhere near the hundreds of meters Salinas claims, so acoustics seem more likely, perhaps something involving acoustic resonance. Acoustic techniques can penetrate thousands of kilometers, though they can’t, to my knowledge, directly detect specific elements.

Perhaps it’s a hybrid system, combining several imaging approaches.

Or perhaps it’s an elaborate, conspiring scam, intended to swindle investors out of mountains of cash. Time will likely tell.