Wanted: Home for Adventurous Robots

mr.crutch writes "According to an article by the Associated Press, Carnegie Mellon University is actively seeking at least 600 acres of abandoned land in Western Pennsylvania on which to test robots developed by the National Robotics Engineering Consortium. Land speculators may want to contact real estate agents in the Pittsburgh area to cash in!"

Comments

600 acres?

[Traxton1]

I've got a spare bedroom. Just send me 2 or 3 would you?

Battlebots anyone?

[NeMon'ess]

Just one day a year, could Battlebots fans please use those 600 acres? I'd really like to see how far Nightmare's blade sends shrapnel.

Re:Battlebots anyone?

[t0qer]

Screw those puny battlebots.

I want to see a schoolbus powered by twin GE turbojet engines and a giant rotating blade go against a garbage truck with big ass pinchers.

I think I would actually pay to see it on PPV.

--toq

Re:Battlebots anyone?

[Dannon]

This thought reminds me of an excellent episode of Junkyard Wars I once saw.

The challenge: To build battling R/C cars. No, not the little foot-long cars you race down at the track.

Take a real junked automobile, rip out the driver's seat, hook up some remote-controlled servos to the wheel and the pedals, and for the finishing touch, add some weapons for ramming and slamming. Take 'em out onto a wide stretch of sand and smash 'em against each other for points.

Man, I love that show....

600?

[_ph1ux_]

600 seems like a lot of land to me. what type of bots do they need to test on such an expanse? I understand if they wanted to build a lot of buildings and differnet environs - but seriously... I think that regardless of the reasons why they tell you they want 600 acres - they are probably hoping to have the 600 acres donated to them so they can just use it to expand their campus, and that not all of that land would be dedicated to testing bots. But they are using the robot testing argument so as to convince some donor that is interested in robots that they are doing a "good thing" for robotics research...

all educational institutions do this. they ask for a large X for project A when they really want to use X for proj ABCDEFG or even just A and Z.

Re:600?

[aardvarkjoe]

Well, the problem of people not realizing that numbers get real big when you square them doesn't go away by making everything multiples of 10. People will still be surprised to find out how big a cubic meter is, and that a square kilometer is a million square meters. No matter how obvious it seems, for some reason people aren't too good at making those connections.

Re:600?

[_ph1ux_]

i wasnt inferring that it was right next door so to speak - the point is that any land that is donated to a school - regardless of how undesirable it may sound now is quite valuable. and even though this would not be physically attached to the campus - it still is a lot of land.

yes - 600 acres sounds bigger than it is - but think of it in real world terms - not metric conversions: you live in all likelyhood in a fraction of an acre if you live in an apartment. The world trade centers twin towers had a footprint of one acre each. they were large buildings - length x width (height excluded) so if you think of 300 or 600 twoer footprints all right next to eachother... thats a lot of space.

I was just pointing out that 600 acres of land to test and RC car (robot mobility) seems excessive.

Re:600?

[jchawk]

Block Quote - "I think that regardless of the reasons why they tell you they want 600 acres - they are probably hoping to have the 600 acres donated to them so they can just use it to expand their campus. . ."

Well see I would buy into this if CMU wasn't located within the City of Pittsburgh. :-)

Re:600?

[aengblom]

not really bots. Mellon is into robotic machines. Things that like to big REALLY BIG HOLES for example. Farm equipment, military equipment.. So it wants 600 acres of land it can tear to shreds and nobody says UNCLE!

actually.. my own personal opinion is they just need a bigger place to party

Battlebots & Dr. Richard Wallace

[T-Kir]

This immediately made me think of the interview Dr. Richard Wallace and his comment:

Q: How many Carnegie Mellon Ph.D.s does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Two. One to change the bulb, and one to pull the chair out from under him.

...so I guess that should make things more interesting?

and the mayor will be...

[mtec]

Bender!

look for local robot folklore in a decade or so

[circletimessquare]

can you imagine being some hunter or hiker who misses the "verboten! cyborg proving grounds, blah blah etc..." signs and sees one of those things in the woods? just as the military secrecy around area 51 has become a sort of touchstone for all sorts of modern myths about ufos, can you imagine what kind of folklore will develop amongst accidental visitors and curious but uninformed local teenagers about this "area T2" (i guess you could call it that)? ;-P

2012, two teenagers creeping through the underbrush in western pennsylvania, near dusk:

teen1: dude! we gotta get home.. they dug old mines here too deep and let loose shape-shifting metal men from deep in the crust

teen2: no way man, i heard a colony of ants developed sentience around here and are building six-legged attack drones in their image to mount an assault on humans!

teen3, running by real fast: i'm gonna shit in my pants dudes! this cold dead looking thing just told me her name was Grace and wanted to register for the next pennsylvania geocaching association dinner!

5 years after that, they'll make a "blair witch" knockoff in which 3 lost teenagers are presumed to be killed and eaten by long-lost golem men brought to life in decaying blast furnaces and steel mill ruins by 19th century satanists ;-P

This article is better

[cfulmer]

To counteract some of the (apparently uninformed) negative comments I've seen, check out this article on the same subject from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

WSMR already has such a test area

[Animats]

White Sands Missile Range has such a test area now, used for testing mobile robots. Typically this involves mine disposal and such, but occasionally weapons systems are tested.

The link is supposed to be here, but the server is down.

Robots? CMU's doing worse than that...

[NerdSlayer]

Screw robots, what about the saga of lobsterboy? Can you believe this is a respected CS school? My parents called, they want their $120,000 back.

Intrigue

Drunken Misadventure

Vow of silence broken

a new beginning