We could be replaced!

[Ranger Ron]

This will just blow your mind.

http://www.bostondynamics.com/content/s ... ion=BigDog

[rgrpuck]

That thing is loud as fuck

[Silverback]

That thing is loud as fuck

Imagine being a bad guy and hearing that buzzing...it would be unnerving. That is by far the coolest robot video I have seen.

[Flesh Thorn]

I remembered reading about this a while back:

ATLANTA — Hollywood may have had RoboCop, but the real world now has a robot more attuned to the prosaic realities of the street.

The Bum Bot.

That is what Rufus Terrill calls the rolling, remote-controlled invention he uses to flush out the prostitutes and pushers who gather near his Midtown Atlanta bar, which is two blocks from the city's largest and most controversial homeless shelter.

"This is actually the Bum Bot 2000," Terrill gently corrected on a recent evening as he switched on the device.

The Bum Bot, like the homeless it polices, is a creature of hand-me-downs. The wheels are from one of those scooters for the elderly; the PA system is a walkie-talkie wired to a home-alarm speaker. The rotating turret is an old Cajun meat smoker.

The cylindrical smoker gives the Bum Bot its R2-D2ish profile. But its black armor — made of exercise mats — and the stenciled letters spelling out SECURITY lend it a menacing air.

An infrared camera and a 2-million-candlepower spotlight are mounted on the turret under a homemade cannon, which squirts jets of cold water at up to 200 pounds per square inch.

Using a twin-joystick remote, Terrill usually sends his robot up the street to the parking lot of a day-care center, where a sketchy, drug-dealing crowd congregates after dark. The police sometimes round them up, Terrill says, but soon, it seems, they are back on the street.

So Terrill speaks to them through the Bum Bot, transmitting his voice via walkie-talkie: Move along, he tells the loiterers, or get wet.

Sometimes he tells them that he's capturing them on video: the Bum Bot's camera feeds into a big-screen TV back at his pub, giving patrons a hyper-local dose of reality TV. The street people tend to run away. "It scares the bejesus out of 'em," Terrill said, smiling.

His home-grown strategy for making the neighborhood safer is the latest manifestation of a lingering controversy that has engulfed this prized patch of real estate.

The perpetrators, he says, are the residents of the massive emergency homeless shelter nearby at Peachtree and Pine streets. Terrill says the shelter attracts the kind of people who have broken into his bar, O'Terrill's, and harassed and mugged his neighbors and clients.

Known as Peachtree and Pine, the shelter has amassed other critics, including the administration of Mayor Shirley Franklin, a Democrat whose father was temporarily homeless.

Debi Starnes, the mayor's policy advisor on homelessness, said the shelter, which can accommodate 1,000 people per night, is too big to be properly managed. She also said it fails to adequately help the homeless make the transition to a better life.

This year, the city cut off its funding of the shelter, which is run by the nonprofit Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless. However, the shelter carries on with a mix of other public and private funds. In fact, it is in the midst of a multi- million-dollar renovation of its historic, 95,000-square-foot building. It will eventually include a coffee shop and retail business to help teach its residents a trade.

Anita Beaty, the task force's executive director, said the shelter is misunderstood. She says it provides employment referrals, mental health counseling and other services. The problem, she says, is that local government has not come to grips with the magnitude of its homeless problem. Beaty's group estimates that as many as 68,000 people in the metro area are homeless in any given year.

(The city estimates that there were about 2,700 "unsheltered" homeless people last year in Atlanta and the urban counties of Fulton and DeKalb.)

Beaty says local governments do not maintain enough shelter space for all the homeless. This, she says, is the last place for them to go.

Beaty is also convinced that the city is trying to move the homeless off Peachtree Street, Atlanta's signature thoroughfare. The city has plans for a sweeping aesthetic makeover of Peachtree: Business boosters have talked about a Georgia version of Paris' Champs-Elysees.

"The emphasis has always been on beautifying Peachtree to get rid of those poor homeless people, to get them out of town," Beaty said. "We say there's no way to do that. It's just inhumane and silly."

Beaty said the Bum Bot doesn't help matters: "Not everybody outside our building is a drug dealer, and when they are, we want them arrested as much as [Terrill]. A robot is not the way to solve anything."

But Terrill said the robot has done a good job scaring off the law-breakers. On a recent Wednesday evening, he ambled toward the day-care parking lot with his creation rolling along at his side. When he arrived about 11:30 p.m., the lot was empty.

(Later, however, after he packed up the robot, dozens of men would swarm the place, hooting after passing vehicles.)

Terrill, an engineer who has designed weapons systems for the military, says he is targeting the people who are causing trouble, not the ones trying to get ahead. He has no problem with those people. In fact, he says, he has employed about 70 men from the shelter at his bar over the years.

But overall, he says, the shelter is doing more harm than good. He believes the nonprofit keeps it on Peachtree just to keep the issue of homelessness in people's faces.

"It needs to go," he said.

Terrill said he consulted the police before rolling out his robot about six months ago. At first, he wanted to arm it with a stun gun or paint gun. "But they said if I shot someone I could technically be charged with assault," he said.

Meanwhile, back at home, Terrill has worked up plans for a Bum Bot 3000.

This model, he said, would used compressed air to shoot netting at people who refused to move on. But he's afraid that, too, could land him in trouble.

"I'd be in jail faster than the bums would," he said. Anyway, he added, "I'm not into capture. I'm into dispersal."

http://www.mindfully.org/Technology/200 ... 3mar08.htm

[rangertough]

We will be made to use it, it will fail 75% of the time, commanders will load it to max capacity and then load more on the troops backs. Some jackass will try to make it airdropable (which breaks scout bikes on a regular basis and they are made for severe impacts).

It will be like the fucking MOLLE ruck, "Look at this 1SG look at all the room the new MOLLE has over the Large Ruck!!! Oh joy that means I can load my guys down even more (envision a small child clapping his hands and jumping up and down in a peepee dance)!!!!" "Yep, that's great sir." Says the 1SG with knees like jello and a back that was bad before the CO thought it would be cool to join the Army so he could pay for school.

WTF happens when the thing breaks down? Do you destroy the equipment that is going to be left behind (including the $100k robot)?

Tough

PS yes it is cool.

[rgrokelley]

We will be made to use it, it will fail 75% of the time, commanders will load it to max capacity and then load more on the troops backs. Some jackass will try to make it airdropable (which breaks scout bikes on a regular basis and they are made for severe impacts).

Everything in its time. Remember that you M-4 predecessor was hated by Vietnam Vets, or, the M-1 Abrams initially started out as this:

[RTO]

[rangertough]

Believe me I'm all about progress, I remember the 1st RBA was poo-poo'ed by everyone until TFR then no one complained. I'm glad we went from spears to the M4. The problem's are it wont be developed completely before deployment, the design team will not listen to the test teams, and some grubby political shit sack congressman will speed fielding so he can rest on his/her kick-backs.

I helped test the Javelin and the PVS-14. When I asked the Javelin teams if they were planning on making the CLU smaller (not lighter) or more compactable. The answer I got was "No, why would it need to be smaller?" After trying to explain that my Ruck was my house and he just replaced all the furniture I use on a regular basis with furniture I only use when company comes over he no shit said "I need to suck it up." This coming from one of the green suiters would have been (marginaly) acceptable, coming from a halfwit engineer it wasn't. The PVS 14 I tested broke thirty seconds into it's first live fire. The cross arm that runs from the helmet mount to the device shattered when it was torqued between my head and the ground. When I told the test team that the arm needs to be made out of something more maleable so it could accept shearing stress the response I recieved was "It's made of spectra which is 1000 times stronger than steel by volume." When I said "That's great it still doesn't accept torque well." the engineers threw up their hands and said "Don't fall down then."

The best piece of equipment that's been developed since the repeating rifle (in my opinion) is the Camelback and go figure it was a civilian development. Why was it developed in a minimal time at affordable cost? Because it wasn't a "pork barrel" development and it had to compete on a civilian market.

[ANGRYCivilian]

That thing seriously creeps me out. Its nasty legs, contorted gait, and the insanity-inducing buzzing...no sir, I don't like it.

[RTO]

That thing seriously creeps me out. Its nasty legs, contorted gait, and the insanity-inducing buzzing...no sir, I don't like it.

You think you don't like it now,
wait till SkyNet goes online and these things become self-aware!

[RangerX]

They'll have to ditch the 2-cycle motor before that thing will ever be deployable.

While having a mechanical pack mule might be handy for the quiet times, I could see that thing being the center of confusion once the clackers start clacking.

[rgrpuck]

They'll have to ditch the 2-cycle motor before that thing will ever be deployable.

While having a mechanical pack mule might be handy for the quiet times, I could see that thing being the center of confusion once the clackers start clacking.

And how would fair in a water crossing?....

I bet it would be fucked up in the salt water / air.

[RangerX]

They'll have to ditch the 2-cycle motor before that thing will ever be deployable.

While having a mechanical pack mule might be handy for the quiet times, I could see that thing being the center of confusion once the clackers start clacking.

And how would fair in a water crossing?....

I bet it would be fucked up in the salt water / air.

Excellent point. Considering how fast BDU material starting dissolving, I can't imagine what the climate in some of the equatorial regions would do to it.

Paint it pink and put a snout on it, and I'm sure Hadji would just LOVE seeing those things roaming the countryside though.

[rgrpuck]

They'll have to ditch the 2-cycle motor before that thing will ever be deployable.

While having a mechanical pack mule might be handy for the quiet times, I could see that thing being the center of confusion once the clackers start clacking.

And how would fair in a water crossing?....

I bet it would be fucked up in the salt water / air.

Excellent point. Considering how fast BDU material starting dissolving, I can't imagine what the climate in some of the equatorial regions would do to it.

Paint it pink and put a snout on it, and I'm sure Hadji would just LOVE seeing those things roaming the countryside though.

strap a 500lbs bomb to it first