FROM WIRED SHILLS
Northrop Arms Its Robot Pack Mule With Big Gun
Jon Anderson has seen a lot of gawkers pause at his Northrop Grumman booth in the Association of the U.S. Army’s Washington conference. Not that he’s odd-looking or off-putting: He’s a gregarious guy. The stares he’s getting are about the .50-caliber M2 machine gun he’s got mounted on a treaded robot — something Northrop isn’t even selling right now.
“Quite frankly,” explains Anderson, a Northrop advanced-systems employee with short white hair and a whiter smile, “a weapon on a robot brings people into the booth.”
That it does. For the past few years, Northrop has produced a treaded, 60-inch robot vehicle to help troops haul their gear called the Carry-all Mechanized Equipment Landrover, or CaMEL. It’s like a more traditional version of the BigDog robot — a simple flat, motorized platform that putters along at up to 7 miles per hour while taking on up to 1,200 pounds of stuff. Northrop has sold more than 60 of them to the Israeli military; and recently, the Army’s Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning expressed interest in the CaMEL as a hauler.
Only the version of the CaMEL Anderson brought to the conference doesn’t have any room to load on any gear. There’s a machine gun where the boxes and the body armor should be, with wires stretching from the gun down into the guts of the robot.
With a grin, Anderson calls it a “new application,” comparing his modification to the first time someone thought to arm a drone with a Hellfire missile. “We’re gonna come around the side here,” he says, “and scare people half to death.”
That’s because Anderson has a touchscreen control, mounted in a nearby mockup Humvee, that jerks the gun around, lifting the nozzle skyward, dropping it back down and pitching it 90 degrees around. Passers-by pause their conversations at the sound of the whir of the gears that send the business end of the gun in their direction. Eyes get a little wider. Walking gets a little faster. In case it needs to be said, the gun isn’t armed.
Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/10/what-robo-haulers-need-now-big-guns/#ixzz13cDUo5va
Northrop Arms Its Robot Pack Mule With Big Gun
Jon Anderson has seen a lot of gawkers pause at his Northrop Grumman booth in the Association of the U.S. Army’s Washington conference. Not that he’s odd-looking or off-putting: He’s a gregarious guy. The stares he’s getting are about the .50-caliber M2 machine gun he’s got mounted on a treaded robot — something Northrop isn’t even selling right now.
“Quite frankly,” explains Anderson, a Northrop advanced-systems employee with short white hair and a whiter smile, “a weapon on a robot brings people into the booth.”
That it does. For the past few years, Northrop has produced a treaded, 60-inch robot vehicle to help troops haul their gear called the Carry-all Mechanized Equipment Landrover, or CaMEL. It’s like a more traditional version of the BigDog robot — a simple flat, motorized platform that putters along at up to 7 miles per hour while taking on up to 1,200 pounds of stuff. Northrop has sold more than 60 of them to the Israeli military; and recently, the Army’s Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning expressed interest in the CaMEL as a hauler.
Only the version of the CaMEL Anderson brought to the conference doesn’t have any room to load on any gear. There’s a machine gun where the boxes and the body armor should be, with wires stretching from the gun down into the guts of the robot.
With a grin, Anderson calls it a “new application,” comparing his modification to the first time someone thought to arm a drone with a Hellfire missile. “We’re gonna come around the side here,” he says, “and scare people half to death.”
That’s because Anderson has a touchscreen control, mounted in a nearby mockup Humvee, that jerks the gun around, lifting the nozzle skyward, dropping it back down and pitching it 90 degrees around. Passers-by pause their conversations at the sound of the whir of the gears that send the business end of the gun in their direction. Eyes get a little wider. Walking gets a little faster. In case it needs to be said, the gun isn’t armed.
Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/10/what-robo-haulers-need-now-big-guns/#ixzz13cDUo5va
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