2wolves: You're saying all its power is on board? Really?

If it walks on a teather, it can compensate for another few pounds of fuel and a little generator easily.

Power, at that point, just becomes a cost point, so in the lab, they're not running little gas generators(which get loud as fark), they're running power on the tether, which is simple logic, and not a true fault.

For many of their BigDog Video's they show it off outside of the lab, being more stable there's less risk and you can can get some testing that you can't do on a treadmill. The biped version is a bit behind that in development.

Fubini: Ed Finnerty: Didn't Honda do this years ago?

I think the goal of PETMAN is to have a robot capable of navigating hazardous environments by itself, without human intervention.

The stated goal is to have a hazardous environment rescue robot, but you know that people are also evaluating this kind of thing for military use.

Honda's thing, ASIMO, is more intended as a public relations platform. It's also half the size and much slower than PETMAN.

I don't know if they show it in this video, but one of the goals for PETMAN would be the ability to navigate in highly variable or dangerous terrain. Or, even, shifting terrain. There's another video where they show it jogging up an incline, and even how it can recover and stay balanced after someone kicks it in the side.

Thanks for that - I was a little confused about why this was a big deal. Sounds pretty cool if they can get it working.

At least until, you know, Skynet becomes self-aware and all that.

Battlemechs? How quaint.

2wolves: I've seen the mule vid. Too loud for actual ops.

Power, in my opinion, is more than a cost point; it's a weight to power point that severely limits the usefulness of the unit. Let us see how nimble, that is the point of the presentation, it is under its own power.

You don't go from plan to presentation directly though. It's a lengthy process, development. They are not presenting a finished product.

In the testing phase it makes sense to not run a small generator, especially when using it indoors.

Easy enough to compensate for. Power at X output of the motor is what's applied, and dead weight added onto the unit, or otherwise adjusted for.

I used to work on Ir/radar packages on things in the AF, reliable testing didn't need to be on the aircraft, that's a logistical nightmare. Down the entire aircraft just to work on it? Ridiculous

The unit is brought to the backshop and worked on, power supplied from generators that replicate the power source of the aircraft precisely.

Know how I know you've never worked in a relative field and are talking out of your ass?

Shepard-Commander...

How long before it tries to kill you and steal your girlfriend?

What I found interesting is that the PETMAN bumped the toe of the shoe on the underside of every riser. I think I would put a proximity sensor on the tip of each shoe to prevent getting tripped up in the future.

2wolves: omeganuepsilon: Know how I know you've never worked in a relative field and are talking out of your ass?

Know how I know I'm just a dirty boot grunt? Oo-rah motherfarker.

Good for you, I applaud your service.

I'm not, however, coming into your ass-kicking threads and telling you to do it wrong.

So for that, you're an asshole. : )

Anyway, as for ops. sound is hardly an issue, a boot grunt can do everything this thing can when silence is what's needed.

When silence is not needed, and danger is inherently more by a far margin(Say, EOD), robots like this can save the boot grunt like you from becoming so much red mist.

Unmanned brute force need not be stealthy either. Example: Tanks, Jets, Big farking bombs, etc.

Nurglitch: Battlemechs? How quaint.

[images.dakkadakka.com image 600x800]

Approves:

If "toys" were "kept on the shelf", you'd be using your bare hands and rocks, nitwit.

/tried to keep it to small words

First person it kills. Is that dick that tried to push it over. Computers don't forget.

2wolves: omeganuepsilon: If "toys" were "kept on the shelf", you'd be using your bare hands and rocks, nitwit.

/tried to keep it to small words

Problem is, you need nitwits, not even the most juicy of A.F. wet dreams equals domination.

Fewer lies in small words.

Too bad the U.S. doesn't know how to play an imperial game.

So go keep warm with UAVs, B2s, and "clean strikes."

We'll still be around to save your balls when the sh*t gets real.

Wow, have you got issues. What respect you did have from an actual service member is now gone.
You're a disgrace to whatever specific service you belong to.

You're worse than the ignoramus liberal hippy types that hate all military members. They're only dumb/ignorant.

You're psychotic. Seek therapy.

Get back to me when I can have one of these.

frowns..

"Please put down your weapon. You have 20 seconds to comply. "

fluffy2097: A landmate?
[img217.imageshack.us image 500x852]

Oh. It's just PETMAN. Again.

Wake me when Boston Dynamics puts guns on their stuff.

If they are building what they appear to be building, waiting for it to pickup a gun may be too late.



/I wonder if they'll build landmates just to give soldiers equal footing against terminators.

a good robotics/science thread gone to pot thanks to anime
Geeks - 0
Nerds - 1

I hate Fark.

fluffy2097: Guess what all those engineers grew up watching and playing?

Project much?

Not every smart person watches that crap, and not every person who watches that crap is very smart.

Such as yourself for the later part.

RatMaster999: [www.homemademech.com image 640x480]
Get back to me when I can have one of these.

An android sex bot? Because I want to be on that waiting list too.

Here's your mech (new window)...it needs refinement, but it's mostly there,

and here's your Mjolnir Armor (new window)

Forgot to note, the robot/AI from Henson Robotics is much more interesting.
Wonder how much of that is put on, and how much is actual AI conversation.

Brainsick: Here's your mech (new window)...it needs refinement, but it's mostly there,

I think that made fark a while back. Interesting work. If not for "battle", for the Aliens forklift utility.

@1:46 in the video, did anyone else get a mental image of a robot version of this:

way south: SomeAmerican: The world has about two decades left before the robotic occupation. Enjoy it while you can!

People harp on the loss of life because a good sob story plays well with the media, but what decides the war is how much it costs to maintain. Even the most bleeding heart liberal will throw soldiers into the meat grinder if they can do it at an affordable price and personal benefit. What happens to the people involved is a secondary concern.
...Which is a shame, because Sun Tzu even recognized that people were important. But at this point I'm not even sure victory is the real goal. Tzu would have told them to go old-testament on Afghanistan and the whole deal would be won by now, but a decade later the war lingers on.

I think the point of modern war, for both parties, is laundering money from federal coffers to benefit personal campaigns. To that end I think robots could reduce casualties and allow us to take action in more situations, but they'll never be fielded with the intent of winning.
Winning is counter productive.

/The psychological effect of hunting down Taliban with Terminators would be pretty awesome tho.

Sun Tzu would've recommended burning cities, raping women, scattering the livestock. The problem with this is that we abadoned the raping the enemies women thing sometime after Clausewitz. Burning the enemies cities would be nice, except that the Taliban are basically anybody with an AK-47 or an old SKS in their closest. Their supplylines are the weapons that can be bought virtually anywhere in Asia (well, I should mention Popy Fields, but we learned that burning somebody's livelihood tends to make them less likely to help you.)

Goddamn you DARPA...Like Bigdog and its predecessor didn't give me enough nightmares...

angry_redhead: Goddamn you DARPA...Like Bigdog and its predecessor didn't give me enough nightmares...

If you found bigdog scary, you'd love the video link I posted above, it'd help to dissassociate the freaky quality of the other video's

/hint, it's not exactly what you think
//didn't want to have to give it away, but it's late enough in the thread now
///I stumbled onto it while watching the actual video's, which made it trippy at first

I still don't understand why we don't make these with back-canted legs like a bird. Seems like it would be so much more stable plus a faster stride.

Hobodeluxe: Do you have stairs in your house?

@1:20: The pusher robot is malfunctioning.


/space has a terrible power

I want my robots to look like either of the ones below:



or

Yaxe: Sun Tzu would've recommended burning cities, raping women, scattering the livestock. The problem with this is that we abadoned the raping the enemies women thing sometime after Clausewitz. Burning the enemies cities would be nice, except that the Taliban are basically anybody with an AK-47 or an old SKS in their closest. Their supplylines are the weapons that can be bought virtually anywhere in Asia (well, I should mention Popy Fields, but we learned that burning somebody's livelihood tends to make them less likely to help you.)

I think the problem in our wars is that we are dealing with a very old culture by using modern, European based, nation building theory. Feudal behavior is demanded when fighting feudal societies.
Sun Tzu's methods weren't pretty. But he understood that war was about people, not landmarks.
Fear, hope, punishment and reward are tools that have universal application.

He would have done things like trying to capture sections of Iraq's military intact, and have a no holds barred war on populaces that didn't subjugation themselves outright. Favor torching a whole neighborhood rather than deal with house to house resistance, and use the threat of it to have his enemies delivered to him.
He also would partition captured land to his generals instead of propping up failed local politicians like Karzai. Solving the power vacuum of Afghanistan by giving it what it needs most, leadership.

These are things that change cultures quickly and rob would be resistance movements of their support. Its not like the Taliban can eat money when people are too fearful to aid their cause.

Now that I think about it... seeing a modern Sun Tzu in action would be a grizzly affair.
The Taliban might prefer to be chased by terminators. At least they'd stand a chance.

miltonbabbitt: I saw that shiat in a Herbie Hancock video back in the 80's. I prefer ASIMO (new window).

ASIMO is indeed impressive, but to be fair, it is being developed to work with and aid human beings, while Boston Dynamics is working to build robots that will be very good at hunting down and killing people. This task requires less adaptability and skill at communication, and more balance, speed, and agility.

The final version of PETMAN for this project will be tethered at the ankle. The tether will supply hydraulic power, sweat fluids, heated fluids for maintaining skin temps and data/sensor connections.

way south: Yaxe: Sun Tzu would've recommended burning cities, raping women, scattering the livestock. The problem with this is that we abadoned the raping the enemies women thing sometime after Clausewitz. Burning the enemies cities would be nice, except that the Taliban are basically anybody with an AK-47 or an old SKS in their closest. Their supplylines are the weapons that can be bought virtually anywhere in Asia (well, I should mention Popy Fields, but we learned that burning somebody's livelihood tends to make them less likely to help you.)

I think the problem in our wars is that we are dealing with a very old culture by using modern, European based, nation building theory. Feudal behavior is demanded when fighting feudal societies.
Sun Tzu's methods weren't pretty. But he understood that war was about people, not landmarks.
Fear, hope, punishment and reward are tools that have universal application.

He would have done things like trying to capture sections of Iraq's military intact, and have a no holds barred war on populaces that didn't subjugation themselves outright. Favor torching a whole neighborhood rather than deal with house to house resistance, and use the threat of it to have his enemies delivered to him.
He also would partition captured land to his generals instead of propping up failed local politicians like Karzai. Solving the power vacuum of Afghanistan by giving it what it needs most, leadership.

These are things that change cultures quickly and rob would be resistance movements of their support. Its not like the Taliban can eat money when people are too fearful to aid their cause.

Now that I think about it... seeing a modern Sun Tzu in action would be a grizzly affair.
The Taliban might prefer to be chased by terminators. At least they'd stand a chance.

Both the Russians and the English tried the whole "Conan" approach to warfare with the Afghans, and the Chinese tried it off and on it with the Vietnamese for centuries, and they all met with about as much success as we did in those two theaters(and lets not forget that we tried "scorched Earth" in Vietnam, too, with the Hamlet and Agent Orange programs). It isn't entirely an issue of tactics; some mixes of geography and culture are just damnably resistant to military coercion. Afghanistan is a land of mountains, narrow valleys, raging rivers, dry wastes, and after almost 50 years of continuous civil war, clannish, suspicious communities. You don't "conquer" an area and a people like this with a large standing army. You can surely march such an army up into the highland and "win" a battle or two, but the people you're there to fight will just run away to some place you can't find them, then come back when you leave. If you're unlucky or stupid, they'll ambush you in some canyon before you even get to your objective and cut you to pieces. If you try to occupy and force your will on the locals, you'll just get sniped at endlessly, day in, day out, by hit and run raiders hiding in the hills. The best you can hope for if you've abandoned diplomacy as a tool of control is to hold the central valleys and launch big punitive raids into the mountains every few years like what the Romans did with the ancestors of the Berbers for centuries. Even scorched earth tactics will just buy you time, however; they won't let you "win" because there's always some dale or cavern or wasteland for the people to hide in.

Areas like this don't get "conquered". They get "colonized". To "win" in Afghanistan would required decades of low-level intra-community conflict. We'd need to take US citizens, plant them in towns in the mountains, arm them heavily, and tell them we don't care if they raid Afghan communities for loot, carry off Afghan women and children, and kill Afghans who bother them or who have land they want. You can't fight spontaneous violence with a top-down military approach. You have to fight it with itself; namely endemic, unpredictable, freelance, wide-spectrum hostility. The only way to do this is to get the locals on your side, something only possible if the guerrillas are actually a separate fighting force, or to make new locals who are friendly to you and willing to fight like that, as the English have been doing with Irish colonization since the time of the Conqueror(and as the Irish example shows, even that doesn't always work). Making a deal or social integration along Greek and Roman lines is far easier, far cheaper, and far quicker than doing what needs to be done to even have a chance to beat a hostile native population into submission. Coincidentally, the only two outside cultures to successfully govern Afghanistan have been the Greeks and the Mongols; two groups who used just such a social integration approach.

The main reason why Medieval European and Bronze-Age Chinese wars saw large territories being "conquered" by outsiders is because the warfare of these eras was primarily a fight between two groups of exploitative elites, not a fight for dominance between two nations (the latin word for tribe). Peasants didn't tend to see any reason why they should sharpen some spears and go harry their "conquerors" because one group of asshole nobles forcing you to give them a portion of your crops every year is pretty much like any other. It wasn't because wars were harsher, but because the civilian population was the resource being fought over, not the primary participant.

As to Sun Tzu, while he certainly suggests using fire attacks and starvation against a besieged city, he also suggests you should avoid fights with unpredictable outcomes, in terrain you don't know well, and against strong local resistance. He states any war should have a clear, limited objective, should end immediately when that objective is completed, that the resources one is willing to expend on it should be determined and marshaled before hand, and that one pursuing a war should always be willing to abandon it and seek a diplomatic solution once those resources are expended. The Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan violate every single one of these dictates. Sun Tzu suggests fire attacks against a city in furtherance of taking it; what objective would burning "Sadr City" or Fallujah have accomplished? How would such behavior have impacted Iraqi opinions of our occupation, or public opinion within our allied states? The sustainability of a campaign is just as important as the tactics used.

Heron: miltonbabbitt: I saw that shiat in a Herbie Hancock video back in the 80's. I prefer ASIMO (new window).

ASIMO is indeed impressive, but to be fair, it is being developed to work with and aid human beings, while Boston Dynamics is working to build robots that will be very good at hunting down and killing people. This task requires less adaptability and skill at communication, and more balance, speed, and agility.

Impressive how BD's RiSE unit reminds me of the spider robots from Runaway. I'll probably start investing in the company when they have acid sprayers built in.

way south: I think the point of modern war, for both parties, is laundering money from federal coffers to benefit personal campaigns.

I think you're on the right track, but it's not personal campaigns, it's the companies they have stock in, or their friends in the private defense industry etc.

A war doesn't need to be won for them to become rich, it just has to be fought. Hence Iraq.

omeganuepsilon: angry_redhead: Goddamn you DARPA...Like Bigdog and its predecessor didn't give me enough nightmares...

If you found bigdog scary, you'd love the video link I posted above, it'd help to dissassociate the freaky quality of the other video's

/hint, it's not exactly what you think
//didn't want to have to give it away, but it's late enough in the thread now
///I stumbled onto it while watching the actual video's, which made it trippy at first

HAHAHAHAHA!!!! I did watch that before, but only got to the first kick then got too freaked out. Glad I watched it further this time.

/That noise still bothers the fark outta me though

manimal2878: way south: I think the point of modern war, for both parties, is laundering money from federal coffers to benefit personal campaigns.

I think you're on the right track, but it's not personal campaigns, it's the companies they have stock in, or their friends in the private defense industry etc.

A war doesn't need to be won for them to become rich, it just has to be fought. Hence Iraq.

More or less. War as the Western States currently fight it is meant to get money for contractors, who give it to politicians, and to ensure grossly favorable contracts for Western corporations within the theater in question. Its objectives are to loot the "developing world" while simultaneously transferring public tax revenues into the private coffers of politicians and their financial patrons. They don't even pretend to claim the Will of the People justifies their belligerence anymore; if too few citizens sign up to fight their profit wars effectively, our current elites just hire mercenaries to do it.

Heron: It isn't entirely an issue of tactics; some mixes of geography and culture are just damnably resistant to military coercion.

Coercion, but not conquest.
Comparing the level of firepower that modern nations have on tap with what has been done, its clear that we haven't gone all out in a war since Korea. Even then there were political restraints (which is how we ended up with a north and south to begin with). The Russians, for their barbarous appearance, still respect western ideals in war.
Its those restraints that the Taliban prey on when they border jump or hide among locals.
If this war was fought like wars of past, with the equipment of today, there wouldn't be a blade of grass left undisturbed.
The Taliban need the favor of locals to do what they do. Without that, or without surviving locals, they are just guys in trucks slowly starving to death.

Heron: To "win" in Afghanistan would required decades of low-level intra-community conflict.

People are more flexible than they appear. I think there still exists the option for a short term brutality followed by long term development. Punishment and reward.
In either case you may be right that the lack of involvement and cultural exchange on a personal level is at the root of it. Everyone walks in, sees a wasteland, knocks over a few buildings and leaves.
Because the Taliban use locals and move quickly, they give the illusion of permanence while our forces seem temporary.

Heron: How would such behavior have impacted Iraqi opinions of our occupation, or public opinion within our allied states? The sustainability of a campaign is just as important as the tactics used.

It would have hurt our standing, obviously.
But so would losing the war and so did dragging it out for a decade.

If we had used Sun Tzu's principles from the start, the lesser sieges wouldn't have been required. We didn't establish a firm control of the land we took and wasted time trying to teach them about voting instead of completing the new chain of command or getting the locals back to their jobs.
We didn't have a plan beyond short term vengeance, and it seems like we still don't have a plan.

My argument is that if we had applied Sun Tzu's teachings earlier, what we have now could be avoided. To use his practices as part of fixing what's gone wrong will create a stir, and many will be unhappy with the brutality, but I honestly think it would be less damaging in the long run than what is to finally come out of these wars.

Not dealing with our enemies or the friends of our enemies, with such an expensive operation on the line, is the kind of thing that breaks nations.

Zombalupagus: I still don't understand why we don't make these with back-canted legs like a bird. Seems like it would be so much more stable plus a faster stride.

[i.imgur.com image 262x395]

Faster stride, but, a terrible ride and I think the balancing issues would be more pronounced.