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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"
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday January 01 2016, @02:53PM
It's not about properness. It's about the circumstances. Infantry should never be placed in situations where silence is necessary. They shouldn't be sneaking around in city quarters at night. They shouldn't be walking around unaccompanied by tanks, heavy machine gun fire, air support and a shit load of other noisy stuff.
The people who want them to, want to use the army for immoral means. They have political and financial reasons not to apply artillery and burn the enemy's cities before entering the infantry in there. They want to snatch and grab people from their beds. They want to assassinate "prime targets" using snipers. They want to takeover local regimens while keeping factories and infrastructure running since they're stealing it rather then fighting them as a military threat.
Understand, this is not what infantry should be doing. Infantry is meant to hold grounds and advance in mass to take already mostly destroyed cities. This ninja\PMC para-military bullshit where politicians don't have the public support or justifiable reasons to open wars so they try using hammers to pry bolts in silence is the reason Vietnam onwards have been such disasters. They can't deploy enough people to get the job done right since it's illegal and immoral, so they're try doing it wrong. It's as simple as that.
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