The newest member of the Waukesha Police Department won't require much city investment other than a place to stay, routine maintenance and maybe an occasional lube job. That is, once it arrives.

For the past several months, police officer Daniel Baumann has been working with engineering students in Milwaukee and area companies to design and build a wireless tactical robot for use in standoffs or other tough situations.

While some companies offer a similar product, Baumann said they were bulky and not designed for tactical situations.

"We wanted to do the wireless thing where you get it into a building and let it go," he said. "It's not a cure to solve all police problems when it comes to tactical situations, but it's a good tool to use in a tactical situation ? or to pinpoint a victim and create a tactical plan."

So Baumann recruited a group of about seven students at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, who designed and built the robot for a senior project last year. Various area companies donated time and parts to the project.

The result, Baumann said, was a robot that will cost the city nothing and provide a measure of safety for police officers. The robot will be fitted with video capability, including night vision, a Taser and possibly two-way communications ability, he said. It has the ability to conquer stairs and a variety of surfaces. The possibilities are limited only by technology, Baumann said.

"Since it's an exploratory project, we didn't want any city money behind it," Baumann said. "We wanted to try to do it with as much donations as possible."

But in testing the robot throughout spring, the consortium encountered a problem: It works fine outside, but once inside, it loses the ability to "hear" its remote controls. The robot was sent to HED Corp. in Hartford, where project manager Razi Ahmed said it has come and gone a few times.

The problem, he said, is the radio controls on it are designed to work in an open area and do not fare so well in enclosed spaces.

"Right now, we don't have anything more powerful or designed for the use it was intended for," he said. "We've tried a few radios, but we haven't had the results we were looking for."

Since MSOE supplies the company with no money for the project and there is other business to be done, the robot gets worked on whenever the workers can spare the time in a small company with limited resources, Ahmed said. He estimated the company has donated a couple of thousand dollars in parts for the project.

Baumann added a lot of people and companies throughout the nation are researching ways to address similar issues, and he added that changes in cellular or Wi-Fi technology might hold promise.

Baumann said he hopes to see the robot in action as early as possible.

"There are a lot of people waiting for it and a lot of uses for this thing," he said.

Brian Van Roy, a master's student in mechanical engineering at MSOE, said the project was a success from the students' standpoint.

"We all got A's, from what I can tell," he said.

It took several redesigns from the students to deal with issues as they arose, but the students got it done in eight months, he said.

"Some of us were definitely into it, and the reason for it gave us devotion," he said. "It made everybody feel good about what we were doing, definitely. It gave us more reason to do it than just making a remote-controlled vehicle. Everybody put their heart into the designs and making a well-built machine."

Van Roy said one concern ? whether the robot could hold enough power for a long period of time ? appears to have been resolved. He said he was "absolutely not" dismayed at the wait to get the glitches resolved.