Update: Company says the robot will not eat dead bodies.
A Maryland company under contract to the Pentagon is working on a steam-powered robot that would fuel itself by gobbling up whatever organic material it can find — grass, wood, old furniture, even dead bodies.
Robotic Technology Inc.’s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot — that’s right, “EATR” — “can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable,” reads the company’s Web site.
That “biomass” and “other organically-based energy sources” wouldn’t necessarily be limited to plant material — animal and human corpses contain plenty of energy, and they’d be plentiful in a war zone.
Fox News: Upcoming Military Robot Could Feed on Dead Bodies
(via OVO)
July 17, 2009 at 3:15 pm
What an awesome idea! This is like the Qlipoothic version of Asimov’s Laws of Robotics. “A Robot May Not Waste Any of the Energy Rich Parts of Human Beings.” Boy! It would be even better if they were autonomous with a really buggy AI.