The Crusher February 26, 2008
Posted by Michael in Science.trackback
From the people who brought you the intertubes (no, not Al Gore), something new:
Photo credit: Carnegie Mellon, National Robotics Engineering Center.
The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA (which brought you a little thing called the Internet), has nearly finished work on the Crusher, a six-wheeled robot that rolls through ditches, walls, streams, other vehicles and almost anything else that gets in its way.”This vehicle can go into places where, if you were following in a Humvee, you’d come out with spinal injuries,” Stephen Welby, director of DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office, told the military-oriented Stars and Stripes newspaper. “Usually vehicles are set up to protect humans. Here, we didn’t have to worry about that.”
Honestly, I don’t know why DARPA wasted time inventing the intertubes when they could have been working on cool stuff like this. Go here for video of the Crusher in action.
Now, all we need to do is mount some nasty frickin’s remote-contolled guns on that thing.
It’s interesting that combat is becoming increasingly robotic. Like with CIA drones executing Hellfire missile strikes.
Interesting, and kind of scary.
For three hundred years, combat has been gradually morphing into a less personal experience, while the technology continues to make it more destructive. Space-based energy weapons are the next frontier in combat.
What does this lead to?
The Battle of Armageddon, I suppose.
But we’re also becoming more accurate with our technology, allowing the destructiveness to be more personal, at least on the receiving end.
I could use one for the daily commute on New Jersey Turnpike.
No, no…we’re becoming that Star Trek episode where we do computer-simulated attacks and then round an appropriate number of people up and gas them.
you say that like it’s a bad thing
Does anyone remember DR. BEVERYLY CRUSHER and WESLEY?
[...] The Crusher « Innocent Bystanders I don’t know why DARPA wasted time inventing the intertubes when they could have been working on cool stuff like this. [Go to I.B. for the link to] video of the Crusher in action. [...]
I welcome our new Overlords at SkyNet.
It’s kind of counterintuitive. Back when men on the battlefield had to face the enemy advancing in rows with bayonets fixed armed with nothing more than a smoothbore musket & their own bayonet, it seems like countries went to war on a regular basis. Nowadays, when troops can be annihilated without ever seeing the enemy, organized wars between countries are increasingly rare; however, wars between races, tribes & religions seem to be breaking out everywhere. Have our countries figured out something that we as individual members of interest groups haven’t figured out yet?
What’s this I keep reading about SkyNet? I am unfamiliar with that term.
SkyNet is the self-aware network in the future that tries to kill off humanity in The Terminatormovie and now TV series.
Ah, thanks, Enas.
so nobody click “I accept” if you see the SkyNet EULA and we should all be ok….
Yes, but where did they get the name? Some mysteries are just so damn mysterious.