Robot Camel Jockeys
4 Mar
Before I got to the UAE, I read in multiple sources that they no longer employed the services of young children as camel jockeys — a highly sensitive issue, given the close association of that industry to the taboo topics (taboo here, at least) of child trafficking and slavery. More intriguingly, that these children jockeys had been fully replaced: by robots.
I wanted to know what they looked like, and google and flickr searches turned out unsatisfactorily.
So I went to the Al Wathba camel race track in Abu Dhabi, and came up close with several robots, which just made my day.
[Photos from the Sanyo Xacti that I use to shoot fortylove.tv episodes, but you get the idea]
Lone robot mounted on a camel:
Row of robots:
Early morning, race day:
The camel owners drive their cars on a separate track, alongside these camels, and use remote controls to control the whipping motion of the robot jockeys. It’s phenomenal. Each of these camels costs at least 1 million dirhams! I got to ride in the car with the Arabic commentator. One of my favourite weekends in the UAE. If you want to know how these robot thingamabobs work, of course it’ll be an episode you-know-where.
