

DARPA's AlphaDog robot pack mule begins real world testing - mrsebastian
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/117493-darpas-alphadog-robot-pack-mule-begins-real-world-testing

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ChuckMcM
Some of the comments here remind me that not everyone watches occasional
episodes of 'Weaponology' [1] :-) That show does a credible job of tracking
the various technologies that contribute to the eventual weapon that you know
today in the 21st century. One of the shows talked about the Tank and how it
was developed to get people across the 'deadmans zone' in trench warfare and
ended up becoming the backbone of mobile maneuver tactics.

So this thing demonstrates a vehicle that can navigate completely unimproved
terrain carrying a useful load. In battlefields like Afghanistan there is a
huge challenge getting troops resupplied (this is true in any war of course).
Helicopters and other air drop means (the robotic parachutes are pretty cool)
require that your troops break cover to recover their goods, these things
could walk into camp where you are under cover drop off supplies.

So one tactician might air drop these things out of a plane at a safe altitude
and have them land within a couple of miles of the targeted base. The vehicle
starts up, and walks over to the base to drop off the supplies. It could
conceivably walk back out and, using a helium balloon, send up a retrieval
cable that would let a helicopter come and pull it out of there.

Thats a pretty cool capability. And in peace time if this thing could walk
into a city ravaged by an earth quake and drop off supplies, that would be
cool. Or carry a clean up device through a nuclear contaminated forest, etc
etc. The key is 'unimproved terrain' and '400 lbs for 20 miles'.

[1]
[http://military.discovery.com/convergence/weaponology/episod...](http://military.discovery.com/convergence/weaponology/episode/episode.html)

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schiffern
So it costs 32 million dollars, is enormously complicated, has a noisy
generator on the back, turns into a brick after 20 miles, and has _half_ the
carrying capacity of a camel.

Cool tech, but we've got a ways to go, people.

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melling
Not really, this stuff follows a curve like Moore's Law. Take the first DARPA
Grand Challenge for autonomous cars. No one finished, or came even close. A
year later, several cars finished. Progress will accelerate.

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khafra
Energy density and materials don't follow a Moore's Law curve. In 10 years, a
walker this size will have similar carrying capacity and range.

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jerf
It's gasoline powered, not battery powered. It may not be magical fairy dust,
but it's not a bad fuel. It's not "20 miles, then plug it in for thirty
hours", it's "20 miles, then pour another gallon in".

Also, it's 20 miles at troop walking speed, not 20 miles at 65 miles an hour.

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dsr_
While voice command recognition is pretty good with a limited command set and
a low-noise environment, a battlefield is not a low-noise environment.

OK, anyone could predict that. Let's take it a few steps further:

\- military bases are not low-noise environments

\- "come here" is a great command, but if there's no authentication, it's a
hazard

\- in the other direction, just how quiet is the gasoline engine on an
AlphaDog? Loud enough to give away your position, relative to the trudge of a
squad's worth of boots on the ground?

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jessriedel
The first two problems are pretty much solved by using a microphone headset to
issue commands.

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DasIch
I'm wondering what would happen if the robot would be attacked? How easy would
it be to destroy one? The noise makes it impossible to use for anything that
requires a certain amount of stealth. So really what is the use case apart
from probably being a very interesting project to work on?

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InclinedPlane
It's a pack mule. Except pack mules require a lot more infrastructure to take
care of and deploy.

If you're in the mountains of, say, Afghanistan, it's really hard to be
resupplied. But with something like this you can take hundreds of pounds of
food, ammunition, etc. with you into very rugged, unimproved terrain. Which
allows you to reduce the load on individual soldiers, increase the length of
time deployed soldiers can fight effectively, etc.

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WiseWeasel
With the noise it makes, I'd give this thing unattended about 5 minutes in the
mountains of Afghanistan before it gets converted to scrap. Hell, it's such an
ear-sore, I might be tempted if I found that thing unattended in the mountains
of California...

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Tossrock
Sound pressure levels fall off as the square of distance. You might be
surprised how quickly a gas engine fades into background noise. Of course,
that presumes background noise, which may not be present in pristine Afghan
wilderness.

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cellis
But how long before they outfit these things with the nano-quadrotors?

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mikehuffman
I have always hoped that new power and energy advances would come from these
military applications.

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tkahn6
I always get a serious 'uncanny valley' feeling when I watch a video of one of
these things. It reacts very organically when it stumbles and tries to recover
and yet the rest of its motions are obvious mechanical facsimiles of natural
movement. Reminds me of rat things from Snow Crash.

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agumonkey
Can't find the video again, there was a humanoid version of this that was
frigtheningly humanlike, smooth, articulated, balanced, subtle. It wasnt made
to look human, fully opened and wired everywhere, yet the behavior/balance was
more complex and on point than anything I've seen.

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spyder
<http://www.youtube.com/user/BostonDynamics>

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agumonkey
I searched for it quite a long time before answering. It's not their PetMan
either, the one I saw was a finer grained, mostly black parts robot that
almost had the muscular system shape.

