Army: Robot Wars?
- added April 30, 2008
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- jcwelker
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Usually, our dystopian nightmares of robot domination involve big, substantive machines - man-sized, or better. But many academics and military futurists believe the real power of 'bots won't be realized there swarms of tiny mechanical critters. (Think the spiders of Minority Report, instead of the Schwarzeneggers of Terminator.)
The massive defense contractor BAE Systems has announced that it will lead a team of academics and military researchers to try to create just those kind of machines. (The picture, above, is from a BAE release - not a Tom Cruise flick.)
The Army Research Lab is giving the company $38 million to head up the Micro Autonomous Systems and Technology (MAST) consortium. Scientists from the University of Michigan, the University of Maryland, the University of Pennsylvania, University of California at Berkeley, the California Institute of Technology, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of New Mexico, and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University will all participate in the push to develop the tiny 'bots.
"The idea is that a variety of crawling or flying mini-droids will be produced, able to go into situations where human troops might fear to tread - caves, bunkers, mountains, hostile urban areas etc. The robo-bug army would then spy out targets and intel for human commanders to act upon," our pal Lew Page notes over at the Register.
But it won't be easy. As a 2006 MAST presentation notes, "revolutionary" advances in "nanotechnology, biotechnology, quantum computing, photonics, neuroscience and novel electromagnetics" may be needed in order to realize the dream (nightmare?) of small, swarming machines.
The massive defense contractor BAE Systems has announced that it will lead a team of academics and military researchers to try to create just those kind of machines. (The picture, above, is from a BAE release - not a Tom Cruise flick.)
The Army Research Lab is giving the company $38 million to head up the Micro Autonomous Systems and Technology (MAST) consortium. Scientists from the University of Michigan, the University of Maryland, the University of Pennsylvania, University of California at Berkeley, the California Institute of Technology, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of New Mexico, and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University will all participate in the push to develop the tiny 'bots.
"The idea is that a variety of crawling or flying mini-droids will be produced, able to go into situations where human troops might fear to tread - caves, bunkers, mountains, hostile urban areas etc. The robo-bug army would then spy out targets and intel for human commanders to act upon," our pal Lew Page notes over at the Register.
But it won't be easy. As a 2006 MAST presentation notes, "revolutionary" advances in "nanotechnology, biotechnology, quantum computing, photonics, neuroscience and novel electromagnetics" may be needed in order to realize the dream (nightmare?) of small, swarming machines.
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Interesting however it's too late. UFO's are here and no bug army will be able to stop the Original Man!
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cool senistar.
It's yes maybe time to implode with more doomsday senarios, but I can't help think how cool it all is. This really is the future that I expected and hoped for in the late eighties as a kid.
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