Tunneling robots have many applications for instance laying underground cable, finding damaged pipelines, rescuing people from natural disasters, saving people from hostage situations or military applications in hunting down international terrorists at a time and place of our choosing. It is for this reason that the subject of tunneling robots came up recently in an online think tank. Which power option would you use so that the tunneling robot was powerful enough to complete its operations or mission?

One think tank member in discussing this stated; The motors running the drill heads if multiple how powered? Electrical Motors, or Hydraulic. What kind of materials are expected to be drilled through, would depend the type of motors to use.

It makes sense that in some applications you would want the tunneling robot to be very quiet and therefore not make the lot of noise while digging thru the dirt and in other applications you would want to increase the noise to alert survivors that you're on your way or so that someone who was yelling after hearing the robot would allow the robot to go towards the sound.

Perhaps a combination of electrical motors with hydraulics makes sense because you may not know what type of ground you were traveling through or how hard or tough the dirt, debris or rock would be. Perhaps in some situations the tunneling robot could be plugged in to a generator and take its power cord with it dragging it behind, while in other applications you would want to make sure that the tunneling robot was totally self-contained and had its own power source. Consider this in 2006.