[DanBC]

> Isn't its durability kind of one of the major selling points?

Or you make them cheap enough to be semi-disposable. That way it only needs to survive long enough to transmit the images back. If they find a surviving ball that's a bonus.

[jffry]

Sure, but presumably these devices (and included sensors to measure things like temperature, oxygen/CO/CO2 levels, etc) could be much more useful if they would survive being thrown into the building, bouncing around, and coming to rest, and then being able to still provide useful telemetry. They might slowly melt in a fire, but in other scenarios (e.g. a HAZMAT situation), they wouldn't be terribly useful if they couldn't survive long enough to come to rest.