Why Robot Trucks Could Be Headed To Afghanistan (And Everywhere Else)

malachiorion writes "I'm surprised I haven't seen more coverage of Lockheed Martin's autonomous truck convoy demonstration — they sent a group of robotified vehicles through urban and rural environments at Fort Hood, without teleoperation or human intervention. It's an interesting milestone, and sort of a tragic one, since troops could have used robotic vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan. What's fascinating, though, is that Lockheed is hoping to get into Afghanistan just before the U.S. withdraws, to help ferry gear. Plus, they have their sights set on what would be the defense contractor's first real commercial product—kits that turn tractor trailers into autonomous vehicles. Here's my post for Popular Science."

Comments

Re:Why is there no slashdot beta poll on slashdot?

[FunPika]

There is a strong back room agenda behind this beta thing. I don't want to find the link and quote right now, but basically Dice Holdings has decided that Slashdot is unprofitable. Now they are either desperately doing stupid stuff in an attempt to draw in new users to make it profitable or they are trying to kill it with this beta so no one is left to mourn Slashdot's passing when they announce they are shutting it down. Honestly, nothing we can do can change this. Just like with other websites like YouTube where stupid redesigns happen, these "betas" rarely if ever will seriously consider feedback to dump the whole thing or allow using the old design. They are set on the general paradigm behind the beta. Dice is really only interested in this point at hearing about minor annoyances that won't affect too much overall and bug reports we have for it.