Wall Street Journal (alas $) has a great piece on the use of robots as camel jockeys in Qatar:

Two years ago, Swiss robotics company K-Team SA received a curious email from the state of Qatar about camel racing. It landed on the desk of Alexandre Colot, who had never heard of camel racing. He needed a map to find Qatar.

Yet here was the tiny desert state asking his company to help save its national pastime by designing a robotic camel jockey.

The camel-racing world in Qatar, an island nation in the Persian Gulf, was on the brink of turmoil. Although a minimum age of 15 years for jockeys was set in 1980 across the Gulf, antislavery groups estimate that thousands of underage jockeys are still used in the region. Children as young as four are bought from impoverished parents or simply kidnapped in countries like India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Two years ago the U.S. State Department and human-rights groups began sharply criticizing the use of children as jockeys, and last year the United Nations urged prosecution of adults involved in it. Qatar, along with the United Arab Emirates, raised the minimum age to 18, and expressed a new determination to enforce it.

Subscribe and RTWT