12/30/2002: USMC Robot

In recent history, since WW2 really, military units move into a hostile country via the beach pretty often. So often that they created the Marines specifically to deploy in from outta the ocean damn quick, and having Marines gives a military a huge advantage.

The simplest, cheapest way to combat that kind of attack: mine the beaches. (Never mind that land mines aren't politically correct right now. You know they use them anyway.)

The new solution: robots. Robots who are marines! Have a swarm of robots land FIRST, coming from the ocean, and clear the beaches of mines. The robot shown above is "Ariel", a prototype that has successfully cleared mines in several demonstrations.

It operates differently for different situations. When if finds a mine, it can clamp on and wait for a signal to detonate, or it may prefer to try to pick up the mine and move it to a safer place. (The first choice is a suicide operation for the robot, of course...)



If it looks like a crab, that's because it is; it was completely modelled after a crab, so it could have the ability to walk over sand, rocks, etc. It understands that it has to change how it walks according to terrain, so a hole or a rock won't stall it (as we see in the first picture).

It starts underwater; it can withstand water pressure of up to 25 feet. It withstands the tides and lands on the beach. Or it might be deployed by a "lander" robot which carries a bunch of smaller robots to where they will be useful.

More info on this one is here; if you go, there are several other awesomely cool military robot projects you can see, including a 3-foot-long mini-submarine that moves like a fish, and a robot medic that can inject immobile wounded soldiers with medication and apply bandages.

Did anyone see Minority Report? Remember the spiders? I thought they were a little implausible, but this is exactly what the military is working on.

Oh and by the way: the US military uses land mines. But the US's land mines are politically correct! They do things like "time out" after a certain time limit, so that after a military operation is over the mines are not so dangerous.

I can't help but think of Kryten's hand and one eye robot in Red Dwarf when I see this thing.

OUR mines kill and maim ONLY for truth, justice and the American way.

Bruce, you forgot God. God always has some sort of role, right God?

God is dead.

No prob god, anything to appease and suplicate.