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posted by martyb on Wednesday December 30 2015, @12:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the silence-is-golden dept.

Google bought robotics company Boston Dynamics a little over two years ago. Now, a potential customer for the hulking "BigDog" quadruped pack mule is balking due to noise concerns:

The US military's flirtation with robotic pack animals looks set to end: the Marine Corps has halted further testing of the BigDog contrivance from Google stablemate Boston Dynamics.

BigDog, aka the Legged Squad Support System, has been under development at a cost of $32m, with the goal of making a four-legged machine capable of carrying 400lb (181kg) of supplies. The final design did just that, but painted a target on the troops it was supporting.

"As Marines were using it, there was the challenge of seeing the potential possibility because of the limitations of the robot itself. They took it as it was: a loud robot that's going to give away their position," Kyle Olson, a spokesman for the Marine's Warfighting Lab, told Military.com.

BigDog's carrying power wasn't disputed, and the robot dealt well with clambering over rough terrain without a human controlling it during the 2014 Rim of the Pacific war games. But the power needed to do all this required a petrol engine, which was so loud that the enemy could hear soldiers approaching before they saw them.

Boston Dynamics did develop a smaller, electric-powered robotic dog called Spot. This was also tried out by the Marines at its massive Quantico base in Virginia, but Spot could only carry 40lb (18kg) of equipment and needed a human to guide it.

Two YouTube videos accompanying the article.

Related: Pentagon Scientists Show Off Robot And Prosthetics
Marines give Google's latest robot a tryout as "working dog"


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 30 2015, @05:08PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 30 2015, @05:08PM (#282563)

    This has bugged me for some time. Big engines (think cars) get all the attention. They are generally clean, efficient, and quiet (compared to decades ago). However, the lawn mowers, outboard motors and so on are still loud, dirty and inefficient. Honda and others have improved them a lot over the years, but they still don't have the level of improvement that the auto engines have received.

    Obviously the problem is money and "will." Auto companies have been forced to improve the auto engine. No one wants to force the small engines to be clean, quiet and efficient. Those companies won't spend the money without the pressure to do so. As a result, when you need a small engine with these sorts of specs, they are not available. DoD has the bucks to change this; do they have the will?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 30 2015, @09:46PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 30 2015, @09:46PM (#282725)

    yeah.
    personally I find it hilarious that so many people spend 12 hours working for shitty bosses, missing out on family life, for getting enough money to live in a neighbourhood where every weekend you wake up to loud engines from various people making their green stuff prettier.
    I also find it offensive that the claim is that "we want pretty green stuff around the house", but they actually burn gasoline to do everything.