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psst, guys, it’s running backwards
Backwards is the new forwards.
Without those wires, it isn’t going anywhere. Well it isn’t anyway as it’s on a treadmill.
That bundle of ‘wires’ is just a tether in case it falls over. The thing is self contained, but I’d bet it has issues turning corners, much like a pensioner.
Gee, the military building fast, agile robots. How cool! I mean, what could possibly go wrong?! I’m sure that is something no one could ever predict. [/soaking in sarcasm]
I’ve heard that this new thing called “wheel” can go even faster.
Has DARPA tried to build something out of that?
It’s creepy because it has the body of a dog, the legs of an insect and it runs faster than I do.
For military use, no doubt about it. But it can’t be cheaper than simply training a dog. And at least you get some affection from a dog, when it’s not doing its job. What’s a cold metal erector set gonna give you. A skin cut, most likely, from handling it. And regardless of how fast and well it might move, and be impervious to chemical agents. It’s not likely to ever have sophisticated enough AI to deal with unpredictable situations. So the robot cheetah is mainly pie in the sky development. Spining wheels, and wasting taxpayers money.
And BTW, notice it has NO stealth mode, like a real cheetah. It can’t creep up on anything, quietly. It gallops slow to fast. They’d be better off attempting to breed tamer cheetahs.
That would be a very good targeting/recon gizmo. Death would come from another direction.
Ya know what would be far scarier in a war zone. An erector set sphere of deadly electric bone saw blades. That goes after the enemy, like a metal skeletal, yoga ball sized, Cuisinart. Remote controlled. And breaks down into replaceable sections, for repair and maintenance. I’m sure the Robot Wars engineers have made something similar.
Wasn’t this hashed over in Screamers No 1 and No2?
They aren’t a danger until they start reproducing on their own.
Pretty soon, the only safe place to be will be at home in bed plugged into some kind of Matrix with our avatars all interacting.
Yes, poor people world wide will still pick our fruit.
Fahrenheit 451.
When the video starts, the front legs move together then the hind legs move together like a ferret. Horses, dogs and cats don’t have this gate. At top speed, the robot is in a gallop. All legs are hitting the ground at different times.
The fastest a human can run is just over 30 MPH for about 25 yards.
This thing is so crude it looks like something from fifties. It should be doing a full leg extension on the rear legs and it doesn’t ever fully extend its fore legs. The legs have two joints only and it was moving with its limbs so folded that most of the length of the lower limb was useless. With the power source and computational abilities off the machine I’m seriously not impressed.
I’d think you could equal much of this with a mechanical gyroscope for balance and a computer with the computational abilities of an apple II.
I always thank my phone answering machine when I push the delete button and it says, “I will erase your messages”. When folks overhearing me ask me why I do it, I reply “Because someday, if we’re don’t learn to be polite to our machines, they may not work as well”.
But if such a thing ever actually ever does come to pass (and I’m not at all sure it will), I’ll probably be long gone. May future generations cope with it as best they can.
cool for remotely controlled recon ops in hostile envs