
Darpa reveals Avatar program, robot soldiers incoming - ukdm
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/118773-darpa-reveals-avatar-program-robot-soldiers-incoming
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Game_Ender
This is a poorly done link bait article along the lines of the earlier
coverage on the Google self driving car legislation. It implies that DARPA is
funding an end stage program to develop Avatar like robots. Instead what they
are doing is creating program to develop the basic algorithms that would allow
a person to remote control a humanoid robot. All the hardware, power systems,
control technologies, will take at least decade of advancement before this
becomes practical.

This is to be expected, it's how DARPA works. They provide the money to go
from a few ideas floating around to solid research and technologies that can
be used to create functioning systems. This is what they did with the self
driving cars, 7 years ago they sponsored the first competitions, (in addition
to other projects they were funding) and just now are we starting to see the
first system that could truly be considered self driving cars. Even those
system have numerous draw backs that will take lots of engineering and
research to overcome.

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mrsebastian
Yes, but the technology to govern/control/run self-driving cars didn't exist
at the time. Computer vision wasn't good enough.

Now we have a robot that can walk, and excellent computer vision, and control
systems that have been proven with UAVs.

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jamesaguilar
I don't really understand why you'd want the robots to be shaped like a human.
Surely small wheeled vehicles with mounted weapons would be cheaper and more
cost-effective for most situations.

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weavejester
And for the situations where legs are required, such as climbing up stairs of
difficult terrain, I'd have thought that a quadruped with a mounted gun would
be a better solution. It has a lower profile when moving, and doesn't require
as good a sense of balance as a biped.

