This story lands in today's "very cool, yet very scary" category – South Korea develops a machine-gun equipped robotic sentry. The sentry robot is equipped with two cameras, one for day-time and one for infrared night vision, zooming capabilities, a speaker for notifying the intruder of inpending death, sophisticated pattern recognition to detect the difference between humans and trees, and a 5.5mm machine-gun.

The robots, co-developed between Samsung and Korea University, are expected to sell for $200,000 USD and will be available late in 2007. The South Korean government plans to deploy these friendly reminders on the border between South and North Korea, to further ease relations between the countries. Or, maybe it's the othe way around.

You can also see more pictures and video of the robot on this roughly translated page. This line especially caught my attention: " … the person the form recognition equipment to analyze the shedding of blood and a feature of the mobile object." Let's just hope that Google was especially bad at translating today.

I imagine that all of the World's Evil Leaders with secret Bad-Guy hideouts are licking their lips.




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DARPA has announced the 11 teams chosen in its "Track A" selection for competitors (PDF) for the new Urban Grand Challenge. These 11 teams are different from the second round selection, Track B, in that each team will recieve up to $1 million USD in development funds, with the requirement that they meet certain milestones and that DARPA will have some liscensing rights to any technology developed.

The 11 chosen teams include:

Autonomous Solutions , Young Ward, Utah

California Institute of Technology , Pasadena, Calif.

Carnegie Mellon University , Pittsburgh, Pa.

Cornell University , Ithaca, N.Y.

The Golem Group , LLC, Santa Monica, Calif.

Honeywell Aerospace Advanced Technology, Minneapolis, Minn.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology , Cambridge, Mass.

Oshkosh Truck Corp., Oshkosh, Wis.

Raytheon, Tucson, Ariz.

Stanford University , Palo Alto, Calif.

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Va.


Unfortunately for the rest of the teams chosen in the Track B picks, DARPA has announced that it will not be offering cash prizes due to new Government regulation. Read the note at the top of this press release (PDF).



I, for one, say this is a huge mistake on Congresses part (not the first, how about closing the borders?) and they'll regret it. How many teams do you think will enter when there is no cash incentive?


Related:

• DARPA Does it Again: Grand Challenge Urban Version 
• Crusher, CMU's Unmanned Ground Combat vehicle
• The Pentagon Wants an RoboInsect Army
• More On The Lockheed Martin Sub Launched Robotic Plane
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Caterpillar, the international maker of heavy machinery and eqipment, is seeking to enable it's bulldozers and eather movers to operate autonomously. Using a system of sensors and GPS navigation, the equipment would navigate around a building site while being cooridnated from a remote central location.


To do this, the company (stock ticker, CAT ), is funding its R&D division with massive amounts of money – $1.3 Billion USD this year. That is almost twice as much as the company has been spending in past years, that is also 2 to 4 times more than any of its competitors.

Among the other benefits of this spending spree, are a complete virtual design lab where equipment can be designed and engineers can see "how every single component of the machine interacts with every other component in the machine as it's moving", along with development on the World's First hydrogen fuel cell for mining equipment. Ultimately, though, CAT is shooting for autonomous operation.


And for all you up-and-coming Engineers, CAT is hiring.


   
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