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.
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Marines give Google's latest robot a tryout as "working dog"
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday December 31 2015, @12:32AM
What's the difference? Google was run by Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt. Now Alphabet Inc. is run by those same people.
It's not like the "stay away from being a military contractor" promise came with a guarantee that needs to be sidelined using the new holding company. So either nothing has changed, or the attitude at top will change.
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(Score: 2) by mr_mischief on Monday January 04 2016, @03:16PM
Or maybe Google was never meant to be a military contractor because it's an information business and they don't want to weaponize your search history for the government. A different division of a parent company building robots for the military may not trigger the same alarms for the founders, especially if those robots are just carrying supplies and not firing weapons.
As far as shareholders are concerned, the strategic statements made by a company do carry weight. If you tell people you definitively will or won't be in a certain business, people make major financial decisions based on that.