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Army Looks at Robotic Dogs
mr. squishie writes "Someone important must have gotten an Aibo...According to Wired news, the Army's Tank-automotive and Armaments Command has just awarded a $2.5 million contract to build a prototype of a large robot dog that would follow soldiers into battle and carry food, ammunition, and medical supplies. This is apparently part of a larger movement by various branches of the military investigating the uses of robots based on various types of wildlife, ranging from engine-repairing robot elephant trunks and mine-destroying robot lobsters to the cliched robot-fly-spy-on-the-wall trick. I wonder if they're looking into giant robot anteaters as an alternative to costly bunker-buster bombs?"
would then be the cheap alternative.
Legs aren't necessarily a great form of transport. The are slow and use lots of energy. Evolution never came up with the wheel, or tracks (like a tank) or rotating blades (like a helicopter). Why should a robotic "dog" be better than a tracked vehicle, for instance?
Perhaps the real plan is to give them glowing red eyes and smoke coming out of their mouths, to scare the opposition. Now that would we worth doing...
The reliability of mules can be debated by those who have actually owned a mule. The expense of keeping them in hay and oats in the desert, however, is not insignificant, while electricity is bountiful is a mechanized unit.
The U.S. Army phased out the use of mules in the last century when they found they talked too much.
Yeah, this is modded as "funny", but it's a lot easier to find food for a mule than a robot. Plus, mules don't need as much specialized maintenance or support.
what exactly does any of that have to do with mercantilism? other than you using it as a slur, that is.
I can't say that you will be successful, but this is an option for you to try.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Keep in mind that this is just a casy study, where a prototype is built. The goal is to check whether such a technology is feasible, and robust enough to be used in a battlefield.
I find $2.25 million to be quite a reasonable amount for this, even if the result turns out to be that such a robot cannot be built in the next ten years, because stronger materials, more powerful actuators, longer-lasting batteries etc. are needed.
Like most things in life, reality is more complex.
First, the $2.5m is to develop the dog. The actually cost of manufacturing one will likely be quite a bit less.
Second, if you sent the dog ahead, you probably sacrifice many of the advantages that you can bring to the battle - reducing your safety i the long run. for instance, an enemy spotting the dog could take a reasonable guess at your position and fire upon you with mortars before you have the opportunity to spot the enemy, evaluate their strength and position, and form a plan to engage. You've given up tactical initiative.
We have and do use war dogs. The Marine kennels are in North Carolina and Virginia and the Army kennels are, I believe, in Oklahoma. In addition, MPs have canine squads just like civilian cops and many of these squads have war dog training in addition to police dog training.
They're useful for sniffing out booby traps and ambushes. There are a couple of problems, though:
All's true that is mistrusted
"Unit 247 wakes up. He is excited. Others are barking. Someone is trying to hurt a nice girl. This makes him angry."
Just how far away from Stephenson's Rat Thing are we?
.M@
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do you use them for good, or for awesome?
K9 from Doctor Who! Yeah!
You mean the fellow who turned down person the year from Time so that it could go to the "American Soldier"?
Looks to me like you're not fit to carry his jockstrap, boyo.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
Try looking up the meaning of mercantilism, although you are probaly too dumb to understand:
t il ism&r=67
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=mercan
Mercantilism is all about establishing colonies and vassal states to exploit raw materials and create markets while building industry at home.
In case you haven't noticed, the US is doing the exact opposite since WW2.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
The prototype is dog-sized. The company making it decided to name the project "big dog". Wired (in it's usual "hip, cool, rad" style of sloppy journalism) makes it sound like the Army asked specifically for "robot dogs", when all they really asked for was 4-legged transport prototypes. So blame the dog thing on Yobotics and Wired, not the DOD.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Another sad brainwashed libertarian.
The entire computer industry is a product of government funding!
Alan Turing's Betchly code buster was paid for by the British government.
The various early US computers (ENIAC et all) were paid for by the US DoD.
Modern large computer architecures were an offshoot of various government funded University projects (Notably the University of Manchesters various machines from the Marconi MARK 1 & UMIST machines).
The original DARPA internet was funded by the US DoD.
The WEB was invented at CERN
Just because governments are sometimes dumb it doesn't mean they are always dumb. And anyway capitalists are so much better at wasting money c.f. Enron et all
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
Oh, yeah. I'm sure the ancient sages 4000 years ago were writing all about implosion-style devices made using man-made unstable heavy elements, fallout, ionising radiation, neutron pulses etc.
If what you intended to say was "ancient Indian mythology talks about wars where lots of people can be killed at once" then I wish you'd stick to that. Unless they're describing the phenomena pretty accurately I suggest it's not the ancient sages that are describing nuclear war at all, but their present-day interpreters.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
IT'S CALLED A MULE YOU DUMBASSES!!! You've been using them for hundreds of years.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
The problem is, if the wars are to be fought by robots, then whose robots will ours fight? The US, for good or bad, is the world sole super power, and with our gigantic(*cringe*) military budget, we can build and develop these robots. But against who?
For the forseeable future, it will be US robots bombing military installations, so that both sides will be avoiding a frontline war in the trenches.