ARMED ROBOTS, GOOEY SNACKS MADE BY SAME FIRM

It’s tough being a small busi­ness owner. Sure, you’ve got a vision for where you want to lead your fledg­ling enter­prise. But the mar­ket can be unfor­giv­ing. And, often times, you do what you have to meet pay­roll — even if the jobs or the clients aren’t quite what you had planned on, in the first place.
Same goes for the defense busi­ness. There are a ton of less-​​than-​​Lockheed sized com­pa­nies out there look­ing to sup­ply the Pentagon. But they have to dip into other mar­kets, as well, in order to get by. Just the other day, for exam­ple, I spoke to a firm that’s devel­op­ing a new explo­sives detec­tor — and an anti-​​aging skin cream, too.
But Foster-​​Miller, the com­pany behind the armed robots that are about to be shipped off to Iraq, may win the award for the odd­est array of exper­tise, ever. When they’re not build­ing gun-​​toting, death-​​dealing machines, Foster-​​Miller sci­en­tists are help­ing make chewy, gooey fruit snacks; train­ing rail­way work­ers in stay­ing safe; build­ing bone-​​growth devices; and test­ing out new vend­ing machines for Pepsi.
Now, granted, all of these projects take engi­neer­ing know-​​how. For exam­ple, Foster-​​Miller — recently bought-​​up by the British defense con­cern Qinetiq — “devel­oped a pro­pri­etary machine to make Gushers, a liquid-​​filled fruit snack, for General Mills.“
Similarly, for Tastee Caramel Apples, “Foster-​​Miller devel­oped a state-​​of the-​​art machine that picks up an apple, inserts a stick, and then applies caramel and nuts in pre­cise amounts and in the right loca­tion on the apple.” But am I the only one who’s a lit­tle con­cerned that the very first robotic killer to be rolling around Iraq is made by the Tastee Caramel Apple men?

December 9th, 2004 | Drones | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.