A Robot Made of Robots via Ares Over at Fort Benning, soldiers at the Army Expeditionary Warrior Experiment aren’t waiting for military robot makers to come up with the right mix of robotic capabilities. Putting that military penchant for improvisation into practice, soldiers there are mashing up their military robots to give themselves the capabilities they want, piggybacking one robot on top of the other until they get the right mix of gear.
Specifically, soldiers there mounted a TiaLinx Cougar 10 (that’s the robot that can hear your terrified breathing through a concrete wall via radio frequency sensors) on top of a faster and stronger Lockheed Martin Squad Mission Support System (SMSS), a load-bearing unmanned ground vehicle that went to Afghanistan recently for operational testing.
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How The First Crowdsourced Military Vehicle Can Remake the Future of Defense ManufacturingTagsTechnology, Clay Dillow, fort benning, lockheed martin, military, military robots, robotics, robots, tialinxThe DIY rig was designed by soldiers at Fort Benning to mitigate some problems they were having with the Cougar 10. While they love the ability to detect a human presence through a wall or obstacle, the Cougar 10 was too slow for teams of soldiers who were trying to quickly sweep and secure multiple buildings. The makeshift solution: piggyback the Cougar 10 aboard the SMSS, which is designed to move at speed and carry up to 600 pounds of payload.
Combined, the two ‘bots performed the mission the soldiers needed it to. But that doesn’t mean a Cougar 10/SMSS blend is a perfect robot by any means. The SMSS is large and loud, unfit for stealthy missions (during another night ambush exercise a SMSS packed with thermal imaging gave away a unit’s position with its engine noise). On the other hand, the Cougar 10 is designed to help soldiers get the drop on their enemies.
But for the mission at hand--sweeping and clearing a series of buildings--it was the right robot for the job. The fact that soldiers were able to quickly build their own customized robot out of robots is cool, both in terms of crafty DIY ingenuity and in terms of the future of modular military robot design.
[Ares]
Previous Article: Bell Labs's Nethead Makes Telepresence Robots Affordable for AllNext Article: Video: A Steerable Remote 'Telexistence' Robot that Transmits Sight, Sound, and Touch to the Operator 5 Comments Link to this comment beantown179 11/08/11 at 6:06 pmWait if we let soldiers do this then how will the defense contractors make all their money?
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JediMindset 11/08/11 at 6:14 pm sadly they wouldn't be giving the soldiers the credit and they pay check. think about it this way, soldiers just follow orders. that's their job. so another "superior" telling them to hand over their creations is just another mission.
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The people of the world only divide into two kinds, One sort with brains who hold no religion, The other with religion and no brain.
- Abu-al-Ala al-Marri
Link to this comment tcolguin 11/08/11 at 7:10 pmIf you are working for a company and build a new robot, you don't get it either, it is the companies not yours. Nothing different here.
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WhittyMike 11/09/11 at 2:21 pm These are
the droids we've been looking for... Link to this comment Zreiser 11/09/11 at 11:21 pmYo dawg, I heard you liked robots, so we put a robot on your robot, built out of other robots to help make even more robots for your robots!
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