Soldier helps build better robots to save lives
The graduate of Hernando's Springstead High School works to refine a robot to detect and remove roadside bombs in Afghanistan and Iraq.
By BETH N. GRAY
Published March 21, 2006
SPRING HILL - When Santiago Tordillos was a teenager growing up in Hernando County, he tinkered a bit, said his mother, Linda Fox.
"He used to take things apart" - clocks and appliances - "and they'd stay that way," she said with a chuckle.
The work Army Staff Sgt. Tordillos performs these days is a bit more sophisticated, rebuilding and tweaking military robots for allied combatants in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"I never expected him to do what he does now," Mrs. Fox said with pride.
The high-IQ son of Fox and Francisco G. Tordillos wasn't challenged by shop classes or physics or other subjects at Springstead High School, where he graduated in 1989, his mother said. "He was bored by school."
"He liked probably recess, and he liked the girls. He was a party animal when he was a youngster," Fox confided.
In a phone interview from Fort Sill in Oklahoma, to which he returned last month from Iraq, Tordillos, 36, admitted: "I joined the Army because I thought I'd probably party if I went to college."
Turns out, he made a wise choice.
Tordillos enlisted in the infantry in 1990 and then re-enlisted with the bomb squad in 1994, where he worked clearing Hawaiian ranges of armaments. The work intrigued his inquiring brain. Ideas ticked away about a better, safer process, even a technique more efficient.
Tordillos and three other explosives experts, shipped to Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey, put their minds together over workbenches of itsy-bitsy parts and carts of robotic skeletons.
These weren't robots of R2-D2 humanesque form, but robots in the sense of apparatuses or devices that perform functions of human beings from a distance.
Actually, the robots look like downscaled track-propelled tanks without turrets, but carrying an arsenal of weapons atop.
With engineering and technical assistance from development firm Foster-Miller, the military men remodeled the firm's Talon robot platform and devised the weapons system mounted on it. The result has become known as the Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection System, or SWORDS.
"All we were doing was saddling (the robot)," said Tordillos.
The unique feature of SWORDS is that it can detect improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, and artillery, and fire interchangeable weapons, from 1,000 meters away to blow them up.
Tordillos and his cohorts in the Explosive Ordnance Technology Directorate of the Army's Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center at Picatinny Arsenal were deployed in 2002 to Afghanistan, using their system to clear caves.
Then they trained the Afghans to use the robot.
On to Iraq last July, Tordillos and his team employed the robot to seek out and destroy IEDs along roadways, a favorite site for insurgents to plant explosives not readily detected by the naked eye.
He admits he was fired upon himself "once or twice." His mother shudders.
"I wasn't afraid at all," Tordillos said. "You know how mothers are."
Fox, 56, just back from a visit to Oklahoma during her son's leave, said Tordillos returned to the United States with a Bronze Star and Combat Action Medal.
For the homecoming, after a year's absence, Tordillos's family - wife Jesse; daughters Ashley, 12, and Sierra, 8; and son Kekoa, 4 - strung a banner across the rooftop: "Welcome Home Daddy." They had T-shirts imprinted on the front with a photo of Tordillos sitting in a Humvee. The banner inscription was repeated. On the back, the script read: "We love you." The family gave one of the shirts to Fox.
After a backstop mission stateside, Tordillos expects another deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan. Then, "another four years and I'm done," he said.
Then, maybe a job in research and development, a big step up from the clocks and appliances he left astray as a teenager.