Corpse-Eating Robot
According to our friends at Fox News, a corpse-eating robot called EATR may roam the battlefields of the future . . .
A Maryland company under contract to the Pentagon is working on a steam-powered robot that would fuel itself by gobbling up whatever organic material it can find — grass, wood, old furniture, even dead bodies.
Robotic Technology Inc.'s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot — that's right, "EATR" — "can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable," reads the company's Web site.
That "biomass" and "other organically-based energy sources" wouldn't necessarily be limited to plant material — animal and human corpses contain plenty of energy, and they'd be plentiful in a war zone . . .
The advantages to the military are that the robot would be extremely flexible in fuel sources and could roam on its own for months, even years, without having to be refueled or serviced.
Upon the EATR platform, the Pentagon could build all sorts of things — a transport, an ambulance, a communications center, even a mobile gunship.
The first thing I checked was the date, making certain it wasn't April 1.
Please let me get this straight. We've got an armed robot wandering the battlefield, foraging off corpses and other debris, on its own for months, and presumably working out on its own exactly what it's going to shoot at.
Tell me this doesn't sound like the setup for a really bad Michael Crichton novel.
A Maryland company under contract to the Pentagon is working on a steam-powered robot that would fuel itself by gobbling up whatever organic material it can find — grass, wood, old furniture, even dead bodies.
Robotic Technology Inc.'s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot — that's right, "EATR" — "can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable," reads the company's Web site.
That "biomass" and "other organically-based energy sources" wouldn't necessarily be limited to plant material — animal and human corpses contain plenty of energy, and they'd be plentiful in a war zone . . .
The advantages to the military are that the robot would be extremely flexible in fuel sources and could roam on its own for months, even years, without having to be refueled or serviced.
Upon the EATR platform, the Pentagon could build all sorts of things — a transport, an ambulance, a communications center, even a mobile gunship.
The first thing I checked was the date, making certain it wasn't April 1.
Please let me get this straight. We've got an armed robot wandering the battlefield, foraging off corpses and other debris, on its own for months, and presumably working out on its own exactly what it's going to shoot at.
Tell me this doesn't sound like the setup for a really bad Michael Crichton novel.
Labels: corpse-eating robot, EATR
posted by dubjay at 10:45 PM
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