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Radiation Robot Makes Troops Safer
Darkman, Walkin Dude wrote to mention a plucky little radiation-proof robot working to make life easier for folks in the military. From the article: "By this time an hour and a half had gone by, and the team was temporarily out of ideas. Phil had estimated that the robot could remain ambulatory in the radiation field for only 50 minutes, and in fact the robot's lower portion was no longer responding to commands. The RAP team, as a precaution against this very circumstance, working with White Sands personnel had tied a rope to M2 before sending it into the work area. The rope, attached to a RAP team winch 100 feet outside the structure, ensured the robot could be hauled out if radiation damaged its drive unit. But radiation shields now blocked a direct haul. M2 was hemmed in. Using a ten-foot-long pole and standing at the edge of the field (which fanned out like a flashlight beam, strongest at its center and weakest at its edges), team members hooked and then tugged at the rope hauling M2. The deflection of the rope's pull slid the robot around a moveable radiation shield without knocking it over. The RAP team's winch then pulled the robot directly out. "
Seconds later, Sarah Connor grabbed the pole and impaled the robot, destroying its primary power supply. Even as its eyes went dark, emergency systems kicked in to begin rerouting secondary and tertiary power systems.
Wise to the design of robots, Sarah and her son, future savior of humankind John Connor, shoved the robot through a nearby doorway conveniently located right above a steel foundry where it dramatically screamed in electronic pain for a few seconds. And then it was over.
"Is it over, mom?" John asked, panting.
Sarah Connor wiped the sweat out of her eyes. "It's over," she said as the familiar industrial movie soundtrack theme began to play. "It's over."
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Where was there anything in this article about "the troops?" Didn't this have to do with irradiating circuit boards?
"But radiation that can kill a human also can kill a robot's electronics. Bennett estimated M2 could withstand intense radiation for only 50 minutes." That's alot of elaboration. I know how cells are affected by radiation, and have and idea of how electronics would be, but I haven't heard alot about this problem and don't know for sure. How exactly are electronics affected by this radiation? Cool robot, though. It'll make a great new overlord.
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. - William Gibson
" Because the robot lacked a trigger finger to depress and release a drill control, the Sandia team stalked the aisles of local hardware stores, buying cordless drills and other equipment they modified into remotely operated drills, hooks, and grippers."
Awesome, like a poor hardware hacker's dream... a big fat budget for using power tools in a manner inconsistent with their labeling. I think this is the fulfillment of a lot of engineer's reason for being engineers.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I'ma call shenanigans on this one. And "making life easier for folks in the military?!" In ONE instance, this helped what happened to be a Military research plant. But the poster makes it seem like this'll win the war in Iraq. Seriously, this is a HORRIBLE scew to put on the article.
Rant aside, I think this is very interesting problem solving. Especially the 10-foot poll bit. Just goes to show that technology can't win everything. Not by a long shot. Interesting problem, interesting solution, both very complicated.
Want to find other gamers to play board and role playing game
Perhaps this event will help set a new model for nuclear power plants. While nuclear power plants should not and probably could not be fully automated, deployment of similar robots could make nuclear power safer. Human contact with high levels of radiation could be reduced and the robots might be able to perform maintenance functions that humans could not.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
My question is this: if the radiation is as dangerous as the article said, why did they manufacture a machine that could impede the movement of the cobalt(?) source? The designers would presumably want no impediment to the movement of the source, since it becoming stuck would cause disastrous effects (as the article stated). Either that, or a method of remotely exploding any locks/switches like that.
Just my two anonymous cents.
Then the RAP team started throwing up gang signs and rhyming insults against the enemy....
A chapter of I, Robot.
Did you read the article?
1) The robot is not radiation proof.
2) It was a pain in the ass.
The story is that they fixed a situation with a robot. The robot didn't make life easier, it was necessary because humans couldn't approach the radiation source, even in protective clothing. It took 4 days to do, and the success was mostly due to shrewd hackery on the part of the team operating the robot.
"...had tied a rope to M2 before sending it into the work area..."
"...Using a ten-foot-long pole..."
"...RAP team's winch then pulled the robot directly out..."
We're getting awfully technical, aren't we?
LEFTIST mass media? no fucking WONDER you are posting as AC!
Strange Slashdot article - a particularly good effort on the part of the editors to disguise this story.
All you need is a HEV suit and a Crowbar. Everyone knows that!
So, how did they assemble this radiation source in the first place??? As an aside, radioactive cobalt bomb is VERY nasty and close to a doomsday weapon.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
The media always covers all these high tech devices that the military supposedley has. I spent 15 months in Iraq and never saw any kind of bomb disposal robot--although I saw a lot of bombs. Those unmanned recon planes are a myth, too. The troops don't have access to this stuff.
Seriously, a military humvee looks like something an 8 year old built with an erector set. It's definately not where I'd want to be when an IED goes off. A real military vehicle would be armored. A real military vehicle would have the seats (except for the driver's) facing outward--so you can shoot at the bad guys.
The government just wastes our tax money handing out big contracts to corrupt businesses. Then, they go to the media with stuff like this to try and convince us otherwise.
Mighty Mouse sounds like a inapropreate name for that robot, maybe they should call it Slowpoke Rodriguez.
Informative? Are you kidding? Read the link. A well disguised shock site.
got sig?
this is why the last rule of adventuring is "never forget your 10-foot pole".
Only 2 sp at Anonymously Run General Store!
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. -Anais Nin
I have to ask...when did restaurants start serving salt that's only somewhat less deadly than cobalt-60?
Software freedom...I love it!
It is neutron flux that will activate non-radioactive materials, not gamma rays.
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And I bet the rest of the party laughed at him for bringing a 10' pole along.
- Kyle
As a PC, I always carry a collapsable 10ft pole. They're so useful!
I can see the geeks saying:
Yesterday our battalion configured Apache and rebuilt kernels all day.
They say the plastic melted from the heat of the radiation, don't ya think they might have considered that the radioactive source woul probibly give off some heat when they built this thing?
Maybe when you're building a robot designed to go into areas with severely large ammounts of radiation, it might be a good idea to put some kind of radiation shield onto the fucking thing, that's just a thought.
I'd love to see how it saves the lives of all the troops who have to go after it with a 10 foot pole, why not just put the cordless drill on the end of the pole and save us taxpayers a few million?
Why lie when you can just make up stuff and claim it to be true?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Having played my share of DOOM, I'm familiar with this limitation of radiation suits. The danger isn't that the suit won't protect you from the radiation. The problem is that you probably don't have enough time to put on the suit, run into the chamber, fix the problem and make your way out before the suit expires. You really don't want to still be in that room when your suit starts flashing.
Dude, you must be new here.
/. since the good old days of GNAA and TrollKore knows about lemonparty, tubgirl, goatse and so on.
There's nothing at all 'well disguised' about the lemonparty website.
Seriously, you must be new here. I'd forgive you if the given link was a redirect, but anyone who's been on
I highly recommend you read wikipedia's entry on shock sites so that you don't get fooled again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shock_sites
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Man, I love Radiation Robot. I've been collecting issues since #136. The 'Half-Life / Half-Death' storyline was just epic. Admittedly, I didn't hear about this crossover with the army, but it sounds like it ought to be interesting. I'll have the comic book store pull it for me asap.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Oral toxicity (The Registry of Toxic Effects of Chemical Substances, 1986):
. html
Human; TDLo: 12,357 mg/kg/23 D-C
from http://www.saltinstitute.org/15.html see also http://ptcl.chem.ox.ac.uk/MSDS/SO/sodium_chloride
True to achieve this for a 75 kg man wold need almost a kg of salt (2.6 lbs) but if someone were to injest this much it would kill most people, although the second source puts the TDlo at 1000mg/kg that would put it at just about a lb and a half or three mcdonalds large fries. I imagine it would take less if it were directly injected, or if loaded into a shotgun...
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
You know what would make life easier for folks in the military? Demobilization.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
They should've just called him "Speedy."
I hope you leave enough room for my fist because I'm going
to ram it into your stomach!
Naturally, all this was predicted in Tom Swift and the Giant Robot...
Give them a break. They're only using a Mark 2 Bolo. A Mark XXX Continental Siege Unit would clean up in Iraq: radiation schmadiation.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
but am I the only one wondering just why on earth they were messing around with such strong radiation source in the first place and managed to get it stuck and spent some 21 days prannying about before they called in the robot...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
The actual problem should be with Non ionizing energy loss (NIEL) the can throw Si nuclei out of their place in the Si lattice and permanently damage it. The effect can be so large to lead to type inversion, a n-type semiconductor layer in a transistor becomes a p-type layer.
... for finally finding Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction!
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
For 'the troops' to be safe.... try getting along with eachother for starters.... Everybody will be a lot safer.
The electronics are affected so harshly that special chips are used on all the satellites. In particular, if they are leaving orbit. Rad-hard chips are special, which you can read as slow and expensive.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
why are they still playing around with this stuff anyway?
...
.. that might not be the real reason they're playing ... tachions and and
it's super dangerous!
"Unfortunately, heat from the radiation source melted the plastic. "
i wouldn't want to be alive after a nuclear world war, and i'm pretty
sure you wouldn't want to be either, so screw you and your
radiation proof circuits
but then again
around with this stuff in the first place
space-time displacment fields anyone?
You know, the story where the robot was programmed wit a variation on the 3 directives where it would obey a rule unless it caused the robot harm, so it would go into the harmful zone, the cause robot harm rule would trigger, it would back out, the follow rule condition would reassert itself, and so on until the people got back into radio contact and told the robot that this mission needed to be done or the people would die.
between the few residual gas molecules left after exhaust, and occluded gases liberated from the tube elements during service. This is why tubes contain a "getter" made of reactive metals (like barium, cesium, zirconium, and the like) to adsorb stray gases.
The key is to keep the mean free path longer than the distances between the active elements. The larger the tube gets, the better the vacuum generally must be.
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Someone tell Floyd that, at last, it is safe to enter the Radiation Lab.
HELL YEAH!!! FINALLY someone with some SENSE around here!!!
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