More than 220 Bandicoot robots have been deployed in India, says Vipin Govind, head of marketing and communications at Genrobotics. The company's reach, he says, enables "even resource-constrained municipalities" to deploy the technology effectively. Despite these technological options, a 2021 report by the Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment found that there are still more than 58,000 manual scavengers across India. Independent observers say the numbers are even higher. The machine that Jitender uses is mounted on a pickup truck and uses rotating rods, high-pressure streams of water, and a mechanical claw to break up blockages and remove debris. "Earlier, a sanitation worker would get into a sewer and clear the drain with some equipment, but now with these machines we just drop the nozzle into the drain and turn on the pump," he says.

A sewer robot that monitors pipework and raises blockage alerts before flooding occurs is set for its first mission. Pipebot Patrol is a 1.8m project led by Northumbrian Water and funded by the Ofwat Water Breakthrough Challenge. The robot can inspect miles of pipes over a 30-day period and automatically report back issues from underground. A spokesman for the water company said the robot would be a "game-changer" and would help cut down the number of emergency repairs. Northumbria Water said 10 organisations had played a part in the robot's development, including councils in Sunderland, Gateshead and Newcastle.

Dengue fever, malaria, Zika, West Nile virus and other mosquito-borne diseases may have finally met their match in crowded cities across the tropics. An unmanned, subterranean, robotic probe dispatched into the sewers of Kaohsiung City, Taiwan has proven lethally effective at locating the hidden pools of stagnant water where mosquitos breed. The sewer robot searches, so Taiwan's exterminators can destroy it. Researchers with Taiwan's National Mosquito-Borne Diseases Control Research Center found that their robotic hunter helped dramatically curb the city's mosquito population -- dropping the number of blood-sucking bugs by nearly 70 percent. Researchers with Taiwan's National Mosquito-Borne Diseases Control Research Center found that their robotic hunter helped dramatically curb the city's mosquito population, dropping the number of blood-sucking bugs by nearly 70 percent, based on their'gravitrap index' Researchers designed an unmanned ground vehicle (top) to scour cracks and crevices deep in the sewers of Kaohsiung.