This 6-Foot, 330-Pound Robot May One Day Save Your Life

Wired - Meet Atlas, the Pentagon’s 6'2", 330-pound humanitarian robot. He was designed to save lives in disaster zones (like Fukushima). But while this Tin Man has a heart, he lacks a brain. In December, seven teams of scientists from top institutions, including MIT and Virginia Tech, will compete to code the bot for action. Each team will send its own Atlas into Darpa’s trials—eight tasks that will test his ability to navigate degraded terrain, drive a utility vehicle, and enter buildings. “We designed Atlas to facilitate programming, but we expect Darpa to make the com­petition challenging,” says Marc Raibert, president of Boston Dynamics, Atlas’ maker. Here’s the skinny on the massive bot.

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Battlehawks and rocks that spy: 3 wild new military technologies from AUSA

Fox News - What do a kamikaze drone, a “field and forget” surveillance system and an Israeli robot have in common? Buzz at the annual AUSA Army meeting in Washington, D.C.
Here are three new pieces of tech revealed at this year's show.

1Battlehawk drone blows itself up

 

 
Textron Defense Systems

A new “kamikaze” drone that blows itself up -- and takes its target with it -- was revealed at AUSA.
Made by Textron System, the Battlehawk is similar to Aerovironment’s widely publicized Switchblade. Both are drones that can be carried in a backpack and hand-launched. And they both represent a movement towards making drones more accessible at a squad level.

Rather than call in air support, a squad would have a drone literally in their hands to deploy against threats like a sniper or an ambush waiting around the corner. The Battlehawk is made of carbon-fiber wings – wings that can be curled up for deployment from a 22-inch tube launcher.

The 5.5-pound Battlehawk runs on a small battery-powered propeller. This drone can be flown using a mere tablet or smartphone equipped with the Android app.

It also has an onboard video camera system so the users can monitor the mission in progress.
Battlehawk can follow a target for half an hour using a geo-location device, or the pilot can choose Attack or Abort Mode. Using the controls, the grenade in the drone’s nose can be armed in flight.  More

Navy’s Newest Robot Is A Mechanized Fireman

Danger Room - Add another eerily life-like robot to the military’s rapidly expanding android army. This one is, of all things, a mechanical firefighter. And not only can it climb ladders like its flesh-and-blood counterparts, it’s designed to interact with human handlers in a kind of human/robot bucket brigade.

Developed by the Naval Research Laboratory, the Shipboard Autonomous Firefighting Robot — or “SAFFiR”; get it? — will help extinguish fires onboard ships and subs. Those watercraft are particularly at risk from fires, because their cramped quarters can make flames tough to extinguish without posing significant human risk.

SAFFiR, expected to be field tested in 18 months, might mitigate that danger. And it shows off some of the the latest and most impressive breakthroughs in Pentagon-funded robotics technology.

For one thing, SAFFiR is designed to use its mechanized legs and arms like a human would, thanks to sophisticated sensors that provide ongoing environmental feedback and titanium springs that act as “joints” to enable fluid movements. Until recently, most military robots designed for cramped spaces like the quarters of warships or submarines needed to be small. Wheels and treads enabled movement, not pseudo-limbs. (Well, mostly.)

Now, much like a person, SAFFiR will scurry through cramped hallways and climb up and down the endless maze of ladders aboard a ship. The robot will have enough hand coordination to tote fire hoses and throw extinguisher grenades. That kind of precise coordination is also a relatively new accomplishment for military ‘bots. Just last week, Darpa-funded researchers unveiled the first ‘bot capable of performing complex tasks, like unlocking a door, with its own “two hands.”           More