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Smart Robot Capable of Hunting For Its Own "Food"
coondoggie writes "Ok, maybe this is getting a little too close to bringing Terminator-like robots to life. For starters, eco-friendly engine builder Cyclone Power this week inked a contract from Robotic Technologies, Inc. (RTI) to develop what it calls a beta biomass engine system that will be the heart of RTI's Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR). The purpose of EATR is to develop and demonstrate an autonomous robotic platform able to perform long-range, long-endurance missions without the need for manual or conventional re-fueling — in other words it needs to 'eat.' According to researchers, the EATR system gets its energy by foraging, or what the firms describe as 'engaging in biologically-inspired, organism-like, energy-harvesting behavior which is the equivalent of eating. It can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable.'"
We can only hope they don't team up with the Multi-Robot Pursuit System project to "search for and detect a non-cooperative human."
1) Yes.
2) Yes.
3) Yes.
I think the big limitation against a robot "eating" living things at this point is that the energy required in harvesting anything that moves is far in excess of the energy that the robot will be able to extract from it. Bound to be an inefficient process.
In the long run, however, I think I'd be leery of giving them any sort of decision tree about whether or not "object A" is edible. Even discounting human.pet accidents, no one wants to wake up in the morning to find that a robot has eaten your picnic table.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Imagine the military possibilities - you drop it behind enemy lines, and if there's any tanks it can't destroy, it just siphons off their gas.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Quote from article, emphasis added:
...the EATR robot's inherent advantage is its ability to engage in long-endurance, tedious, and hazardous tasks, such as reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition under difficult conditions, without fatigue or stress...
So we've got omnivorous assassin bots that consume their "target" after "acquisition" to remove evidence of the mission. That's just great.
Can you elaborate on whatever point you're making?
With two iterations they were able to make a vehicle more efficient than the original with superior performance.
This implies to me that with another couple decades (just give it a small fraction of the time that's been spent on your classic ICE four-strokes) the technology could be refined to be a direct drop-in, in terms of mass. Materials technology has advanced significantly since those vehicles were put out as well. And finally, if they had produced a vehicle with the same overall performance characteristics of the original the powerplant would have been lighter - this was a prototype retrofit designed to determine the potential of the technology.
My point was that using a heat engine does not necessarily have any drawbacks in common use whatsoever, including increased mass. That has only been the case so far.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"