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."

Comments

Not like Terminator

[DoofusOfDeath]

Ok, maybe this is getting a little too close to bringing Terminator-like robots to life.

No, too-Terminator-like would be if it said, "You are not Sarah Connor. But I am a bit peckish...."

Re:Not like Terminator

[ShieldW0lf]

Come on... look on the bright side. Instead of your child getting blown apart by a land mine left over from the last invasion, they can get blown apart by a hunter-killer drone. That's WAY cooler.

Reminds me of Stephen King's The Dark Tower... maybe they could dress it up like a bear...

Re:Not like Terminator

[memnock]

... more like The Matrix.

I'm starting to think that the Amish

[wiredog]

may just have a point.

Re:I'm starting to think that the Amish

[$RANDOMLUSER]

I'm sure the robots will find them delicious as well.

Re:I'm starting to think that the Amish

[SatanicPuppy]

I bet the Amish could apply for the "organic" label.

If a machine only eats "organic" people, do you think they'd be eligible for tax breaks as a "green" consumer?

Re:I'm starting to think that the Amish

[SatanicPuppy]

No, more like "Genuine Corn Fed Humans, no extra processing, no artificial hormones or sweeteners! Raised on the farm without cages!"

Only a few questions

[ari_j]

1. Am I "biomass"?
2. Is my kitten, Fluffy, who likes to go outside, "biomass"?
3. If I died in my home, would I then become "biomass"? In other words, will Fluffy have any competition for my corpse?

Re:Only a few questions

[SatanicPuppy]

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.

Re:Only a few questions

[nizo]

...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.

Tell that to every ambush predator on the planet. As an added bonus, I bet the standby mode on the robot burns less energy than most waiting ambush predators too.

"Hey, is that a new trashcan outside the Dunkin Donuts? Huh I think it moved....WAARGHHHHHHH...."

Re:Only a few questions

[MjDelves]

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.

1. Attach an object-tracking device and a harpoon to it.

2. Reel in the prey.

3. Put prey in a big sealed container.

4. Time/Standby mode.

5. Lots of biogas.

6. Dung heap.

7. GOTO 1.

Nothing to it.

Re:Only a few questions

[Hognoxious]

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.

Re:Only a few questions

[MickLinux]

Nonsense. Humans have the advantage of endurance. Our aboriginals literally can run/walk prey to the point of fatigue, and then attack them when they're weak. Not too different than wolves. We are built to go long times at a moderately fast pace, as opposed to short times at a super fast pace.

Re:Only a few questions

[ceoyoyo]

I imagine a robot that can eat biomass would do pretty well as a trashcan outside Dunkin Donuts anyway. Lots of fat and sugar getting tossed in when the doughnuts go stale.

Or McDonalds, for that matter.

biomass to fuel?

[furby076]

So this thing can forage for biomass, which means it is not that picky...why can't we put this in our cars for fuel (ala Mr. Fusion - Back To the Future II)

Re:biomass to fuel?

[SatanicPuppy]

It's almost certainly wildly inefficient.

That gasoline engine in your car is inefficient compared to a big power generator that uses the same fuel. The size, the inability to efficiently process the waste heat...It all adds up.

Taking into account the returns of biomass plants that use high-grade biomass (e.g. corn, unprocessed chicken/pig parts, etc) and then taking into account the efficiency that will certainly be lost by reducing that process to something small enough to be mobile, and I'll be surprised if they can make it work at all.

Re:biomass to fuel?

[internerdj]

I misread your post and got the mental image of waking up, preparing for work, going to the garage and finding my car has wandered off in search of fuel because it "got hungry."

Re:biomass to fuel?

[SatanicPuppy]

Well, I imagine that after billions of years of work, and uncountable design changes, our robots will be able to do it too.

In other words, it's not apples to apples. It would take me less energy to build a car from parts than it would take a car to drive a hundred miles. That's because I'm a machine at the end of a multi-million year design process, optimized to live on a wide variety of biomass, in a wide variety of terrains, that is capable of reproducing myself and building semi-autonomous tools.

Re:biomass to fuel?

[nedlohs]

You can, and have been able to for over a century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_car

Re:biomass to fuel?

[drinkypoo]

The problem is the heat exchanger has to be pretty big, so they tend to have lower power density... that is, a heat engine (say, a stirling engine) will be larger and heavier than an internal combustion engine of the same output.

I disagree.

Re:biomass to fuel?

[drinkypoo]

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.

My worst fear

[parascott]

I have visions of the energizer bunny as a mutant omnivore.

It just keeps going, and going, and going.....

For the love of God!

[Locke2005]

Please don't give these abominations the ability to make replicas of themselves!

Re:For the love of God!

[benjamindees]

A few years back I thought about building an autonomous, self-replicating robot like this. My idea was that it would live in a museum, and people could feed it coins.

Besides the coins, everything else would come from the immediate environment. It would forage for biomass as fuel. Once it had gathered enough fuel and coins, it would reproduce.

It seemed like a feasible, if horribly complex, task. I thought it would make a nice open source project.

Remember the most important lesson...

[Anonymous Coward]

Limit the robots to a six foot power cord.

Not at all premature

[$RANDOMLUSER]

We can't even safely do an autonomous robot lawn mower that won't grind up the neighbor's cat.

Re:Not at all premature

[Covert Penguin]

You're assuming that the lawn mower was tasked with the cat's safety in addition to cutting the grass.

Alternatives:
1.) Make the wheels smaller so the cat can't enter the business end of the machine.
2.) Get a dog. Most are too big for the lawnmower to injure, and will keep the cat off the grass.
3.) Reconsider feline sympathy.

Unstopable!

[snspdaarf]

Great. This thing will siphon your fuel tank, and if that fails, threaten to eat your cat unless you hand over the charge card for the local service station.

What will it do when it figures out WE are biomass?

Some prior art...

[leipold]

...from back in 2001 was UWE's Slugbot, which was supposed to 'live off the land' by finding and digesting agricultural pests:

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/news/2001/10/47156

Alternative to scary Sci-Fi plots

[i am calliope]

While there is the possibility of this giving life to Sci-Fi plots such as Dune, Terminator, and Battlestar, I can't help but think that the eating robot can do a lot to save us. What if this "biomass" were food scraps, animal feces, or some other waste product? Cow dung lets off mass amounts of methane that can then be burned. The eating robot could help decrease a need for landfills and decrease carbon in the atmosphere.

Re:Alternative to scary Sci-Fi plots

[lucas_picador]

"Attention, citizen! I am Robocop(rophage). Step away from the doggie doo and nobody gets eaten."

"Thank you for your copro-peration."

(Sorry, I just can't stop.)

My home would be an ideal habitat

[srussia]

When can I get a Roomba that runs on nacho crumbs and spilled Mountain Dew?

Re:My home would be an ideal habitat

[smitty97]

Technically the Roomba falls into this category.. Not with dust and dirt, but it does seek out its base station when it gets hungry for its EMF food

Ummm, I'm thinking that, in this situation

[wiredog]

they'd be the "consumed" rather than the "consumers", so no tax break. Unless you're talking about giving the robots a tax break.

Re:Ummm, I'm thinking that, in this situation

[Retric]

I don't think the "consumed" need a tax break. So, I expect he was talking about the robots.

Dr. Frankenstein

[SL1200MKII]

"Cyclone brings to this project one of the most advanced external combustion engine technologies we have seen," stated Dr. Robert Finkelstein, President of RTI"

Maybe it's just me but I find it a little worrying that this monster of a robot was created by Dr. Finkelstein

It's alive Igor, It's Alive!!

Protection

[ohnotherobots]

Fortunately my tinfoil hat will cause the robots to think I am not made of organic material.

Not a new idea

[Thelasko]

Although I've never seen anything exactly like this, I've personally built a BEAM robot that foraged for its own "food". Instead of seeking biomass, or hydrocarbons, my little BEAM robot just looked for a light source to charge its capacitors through photovoltaic cells.

Re:How much longer

[Anonymous Coward]

So the nuclear war was really just emo-skynet cutting itself?

DARPA's new endeavor

[NonUniqueNickname]

long-endurance missions such as search and rescue in the mountains and caves of Afghanistan and Pakistan

Greetings person in Afghan cave.
I am a robot.
I am here to rescue you.
*chainsaw*
Stand still so I can rescue you.

Oh shoot!

[Bovius]

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.

Re:Oh shoot!

[couchslug]

"So we've got omnivorous assassin bots that consume their "target" after "acquisition" to remove evidence of the mission. That's just great."

"Whirrrr...click....BLAM!

OM NOM NOM NOM.

Sploot.

Whirr...."

Sun

[Idiomatick]

Wouldn't solar power be easier? Where there are enough things to eat to survive there is enough sun to survive. Though i suppose its neat.

NOM NOM NOM

[Antlerbot]

So I think I see a solution to the homeless problem coming up...

Re:WhatCouldPossiblyGoWrong

[ari_j]

Let's just hope they read xkcd:

thisAlgorithmBecomingSkynetCost = 999999999;