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Aussie Army Trains With Fleet of Robots On Segways
kkleiner writes "The armed forces of the world have already begun to hunt down and shoot robots. No, it's not the beginning of the man-machine war; it's a state-of-the-art training simulation that's very cool to watch. Australia-based Marathon Robotics has taken Segways and turned them into human-shaped autonomous robots capable of moving around streets and buildings just like people in a crowd! The Marathon bots can act like insurgents, hostages, or civilians, letting armed soldiers practice before being exposed to the real thing. The Australian Department of Defense already has a training camp using the robots, and the US Marine Corps will be establishing one this year."
Actually, the videos showed them using it as sniper training. In real life, the targets move around, scatter when shots break out, etc. You can't simulate that with paper targets, and shooting at real people during training generates a lot of paperwork.
I would pay cash to be able to play this.
The robots are for sniping practice. For long range shooting, nothing comes close to the actual thing. You really don't want to put real people out on the range.
I mean sure, they COULD just send their snipers off big game hunting, but that might not play so well.
Give the US its due. Many of its citizens have learned to speak the Queen's English with fairly good results, its just on the spelling front that they apparently have problems. Sadly, up here in Canada a lot of people are adopting the US spellings it seems. I presume this is due to so many spell checkers defaulting to the mangled US spellings for words (if they offer the correct spelling as an option at all).
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
If you watch the video, they mention that the Segways lurch forward a bit when accelerating in a way that is similar to the posture of a human running. Also, I suspect that the stability that 4 wheels gives a platform is far too unrealistic to mimic humans well: If you ever read up on the physics of walking on two legs, you'll find that humans tend to lurch and sway a lot in a somewhat similar way to the segways.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Not to dispute your point, but we're buying Tiger's. Not sure what we'll do with them. They'll probably hang around here and never deploy, just like the Leopards.
nah, we've given up on both those fronts and figured we might stand a chance of an actual victory if we stick in afghanistan
Wait! Whats a sig?
True, but I'd seen dozens of photos of wombats before I saw a real ones and got that impression. Trying to stop a fairly young Wombat from going where it wanted to go was like stopping a minature bulldozer :)
Spike Milligan's mostly serious WWII memoirs sum that up fairly well. A lot of waiting about and brief bursts of action appears to be the norm in most conflicts.