Robo Soldier Programs All Over the World

The Soldiers that never sleeps: The Super aEgis II


The Super aEgis II, South Korea’s best-selling automated turret, will not fire without first receiving an OK from a human. The human operator must first enter a password into the computer system to unlock the turret’s firing ability. Then they must give the manual input that permits the turret to shoot. “It wasn’t initially designed this way,” explains Jungsuk Park, a senior research engineer for DoDAAM, the turret’s manufacturer. Park works in the Robotic Surveillance Division of the company, which is based in the Yuseong tech district of Daejon. It employs 150 staff, most of whom, like Park, are also engineers. “Our original version had an auto-firing system,” he explains. “But all of our customers asked for safeguards to be implemented. Technologically it wasn’t a problem for us. But they were concerned the gun might make a mistake.”




Atlas - The Agile Anthropomorphic Robot





Atlas is a high mobility, humanoid robot designed to negotiate outdoor, rough terrain. Atlas can walk bipedally leaving the upper limbs free to lift, carry, and manipulate the environment. In extremely challenging terrain, Atlas is strong and coordinated enough to climb using hands and feet, to pick its way through congested spaces.

Articulated, sensate hands will enable Atlas to use tools designed for human use. Atlas includes 28 hydraulically-actuated degrees of freedom, two hands, arms, legs, feet and a torso.

An articulated sensor head includes stereo cameras and a laser range finder. Atlas is powered from an off-board, electric power supply via a flexible tether.




 

Hydra, Team NEDO-Hydra, Japan


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Chimp looks like a character from Transformers. At 5ft tall and weighing 443lb, it has a red metal shell, tank-like treads for feet and arms with a three-pronged pincer that can each lift the weight of a smallish man. But it took the robot several minutes to get out of a car and when it tried to open a door, it fell over and broke the frame.

Chimp was competing for the $2m first prize in the final of a US government-sponsored competition held last month where the robots had to complete eight tasks that mimicked the conditions at the Fukushima nuclear disaster, such as turning off a valve and cutting a hole in a wall with a drill. Many of the robots tumbled, sometimes comically. They moved so slowly one of the organisers likened it to “watching paint dry”





DARPA Robotic Pack Mule, Boston Dynamics, US


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A robotic pack mule being developed for the Pentagon by Boston Dynamics could give U.S. troops a leg up in terrain too rough even for military vehicles.

The mechanized four-legged robot, capable of carrying all the gear soldiers and Marines might need in combat, still faces two years of on-the-ground testing, but it appears to be the high-tech equivalent of the pack mule that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has been looking for.

"A legged robot can unburden dismounted squad members by carrying their gear, autonomously following them through rugged terrain, and interpreting verbal and visual commands," DARPA said in a release about the project.





iRobot 710 Kobra


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The iRobot 710 Kobra is a powerful, rugged, fast robot that supports or carries multiple and heavy payloads while not sacrificing mobility or operation over rough terrain and stairs. Designed with power, agility and flexibility in mind, the iRobot 710 Kobra can lift in excess of 330 pounds, negotiate around and through obstacles and be equipped with numerous payloads to expand your operational area.





RHex, MAST, US
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A year ago, physicist Daniel Goldman sent me a video of a skeletal creature pushing its way through sand. It came with a superlative descriptor: “World's first baby turtle robot.” I wrote 196 words for Science’s website under the Internet-friendly headline "Meet FlipperBot.”

Goldman created FlipperBot as a model to figure out how sea turtles use their flippers—appendages that sport an obvious utility for traveling through water—to crawl through sand. For the Georgia Sea Turtle Center, which contributed to a six-week study on hatchling movement for the paper, insights from FlipperBot might help explain why some babies get stuck on their journey from nest to ocean. To paleontologists, the baby bot could be a step to understanding how fish may have first crawled out of the water and onto sand.