Wired Blogs: Gadget Lab Stares in Awe at the Walking Dog

Link: Wired Blogs: Gadget Lab.

Creepy Dog Robot Planned for the US Military

By Charlie Sorrel July 16, 2007 | 7:27:12 AM

Categories: Defense, Innovations

It's been a long time coming, but the BigDog, a robotic pack mule, has just won $10 million in Pentagon funding. The robot, covered way back in 2004 by Danger Room's Noah Shachtman, is designed to carry equipment for soldiers. The petrol-engined quadruped will supposedly run and jump with its load, negotiating obstacles up to a meter (3.3 feet) high and two meters wide. As you can see from the video, the BigDog is pretty noisy, but worse than that, the naturalistic movement really creeps me out. It's like an AT-AT crossed with a rickshaw.

(((Yeah, yeah, I know – some boondoggle Pentagon robot. Where's the zillion-dollar spare parts? But look at the insane way this lurching mongrel picks its way through mud, sharp rocks, and snow. And those horrible little hooves it has, and its bandage-wrapped black-zombie legs... and that irritating whining noise it makes. I don't see it "running and jumping," but it's so cheap-looking and pig-ugly that it looks entirely convincing – twenty years from now, tech-savvy global-guerrilla marauders will be strapping IEDs and AK47s onto these things and unleashing them on remote mountain villages.)))

(((And if that's not enough to un-nerve you, check out this magazine editor's homemade Predator robot spy plane.)))

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/07/anderson-makes-.html