DARPA (motto: “If It Kills People, We’ll Fund It, No Matter How Weird It Is”) has really topped itself this time. You might remember Boston Dynamics and their BigDog, a robot pack mule that looked really, really creepy. Granted, not as creepy as your average Japanese robot, and it was actually an advance in robotics, but still, creepy.
So, yeah, now they’re building a robot cheetah. No, it can’t combine with four others to make a really big man-sized one.
The idea is that Robocheetah, with its flexible spine and cheetah design, can move faster than any human and “chase and evade”. Boston Dynamics doesn’t really talk about the military applications, possibly because there was just no positive way to spin “running a human down like prey and mauling them”, but also claims it’ll have applications in emergency response, fire fighting, and “vehicular travel”.
You want us to ride that thing? Just because it looks like Voltron doesn’t mean…well…I mean…OK, maybe we’ll ride it once.
Oh, and buried in the press release is the fact that they’re building a robot that’s essentially a T-800 without a head. Why’d they leave out the head, copyright infringement or they just want it to lack eyes and give us a fighting chance to kill it?
[ via the resistance fighters at Wired ]