Robot made by Clinton firm in Oscar winner 'The Hurt Locker'

Robotec device in opening scenes of "The Hurt Locker"

CLINTON - A Clinton product plays a starring role in the first riveting moments of the movie voted best picture of the year in Sunday's Academy Awards.

That's when an HD-1 model robot made by Remotec Inc. is sent to inspect a suspected insurgent booby trap rigged with explosives in Baghdad.

Those first five minutes of "The Hurt Locker" are realistic, said Mike Knopp, Remotec president, who said he's watched the movie twice.

"The rest is a lot of Hollywood," he said of the remainder of that tense scene.

Remotec, which has been in Clinton's Eagle Bend Industrial Park for five years, has received extensive publicity from the movie, which won six Oscars at the 82nd annual Academy Awards.

"It was worth our time from a public relations standpoint," Knopp said.

Remotec loaned the movie producers the robot, and the producers paid expenses for the HD-1 demonstration model and an operator to travel to Jordan, where the movie was filmed, he said.

The company's robot operator sent the machine on its movie mission to inspect the suspected terrorist bomb trap, and that scene of the HD-1 in action is realistic, Knopp said.

But the film becomes a bit far-fetched when a wheel on an explosives-laden trailer towed by the robot falls off, and the HD-1's mission is aborted, he said.

Military teams that defuse bombs "are a lot more cautious" than what's depicted in the movie's ensuing scene, Knopp said.

Remotec's annual sales are between $40 million and $50 million and the company has about 100 employees.

The company now manufacturers five models of robots used mainly to inspect and defuse explosives. Between 200 and 300 robots are made annually, according to Knopp.

The robot filmed in "The Hurt Locker" is one of the company's "smaller, more agile" models, he said, noting that it has returned to its role as a demo.

Knopp said more than 300 of the company's robots have been deployed in Iraq.

Two engineers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory launched Remotec in 1980, and Northrop Grumman acquired the business in 1996.

The company was first based in Oak Ridge and operated from smaller quarters but relocated to a leased 72,000-square-foot building in Clinton in 2005.

Source: Knoxville News Sentinel