GRENADE BOT BLASTS AWAY

Those of you who found the idea of gun-​​toting robots a lit­tle creepy should prob­a­bly click away right now. Because the Army has just fin­ished test­ing out a unmanned ground vehi­cle, or UGV, that oblit­er­ates its foes with electrically-​​fired grenades.
The robot is the same mod­i­fied Talon UGV that’s now on its way to Iraq, to watch the back of Stryker armored vehi­cles on patrol. But instead of car­ry­ing a M249 machine gun, like the Iraq-​​bound robo-​​grunt, this Talon has been armed by Metal Storm Limited — the Australian firm famous for its million-​​round-​​a-​​minute gun.
The robot, which recently wrapped up tri­als at the Army’s Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey, only had 16 shots. But they were big ones: 40 mm grenades. And the rounds were loaded four to a bar­rel, giv­ing the UGV 10 more shots than tra­di­tional sys­tems sup­ply. It was enough to waste a vari­ety of mock oppo­nents, “includ­ing sim­u­lated per­son­nel, an infantry car­rier and a bunker,” accord­ing to Metal Storm. (You can watch video of the bot in action here.) Eventually, the firm thinks it can load the UGV up with as many as 48 grenades at a time.
While Metal Storm seemed pretty psy­ched about how the Picatinny tests went, there was a bit of bad news for the com­pany. The demon­stra­tions “did not include fir­ings from the Dragonfly DP4X unmanned aer­ial vehi­cle as pre­vi­ously planned because of oper­a­tional restric­tions on the range which pre­vented in-​​flight live fire tri­als being pos­si­ble,” Metal Storm sobbed. “Arrangements are cur­rently being made for in-​​flight test-​​firings and demon­stra­tions to be held in the next few months.“
I’m ner­vous already.

March 30th, 2005 | Drones | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.