TOUGHEST DRONE, DEFENDED

Navy roboti­cist H.R. “Bart” Everett is not happy with me, or with a post I wrote back in March on his cre­ation, the ROBART III.
“Maybe there’s been a less intim­i­dat­ing guard drone devel­oped by the U.S. mil­i­tary. But I haven’t seen it,” I said then of the 2XL-​​looking robot pro­to­type, designed to detect intrud­ers, and pop ‘em with a sim­u­lated dart gun.
Here’s what Everett had to say this morn­ing about Toughest. Drone. Ever, my “put-​​down arti­cle on ROBART III:”

1. This plat­form is a research pro­to­type only.
2. It was never intended to leave the lab­o­ra­tory envi­ron­ment.
3. It serves as a tech-​​base devel­op­ment tool for hard­ened pro­duc­tion sys­tems which are designed for the real world.
4. The pro­duc­tion ver­sion of ROBART is called the Mobile Detection Assessment Response System (MDARS).
5. There is an indoor ver­sion and an out­door ver­sion, which you can see at www​.spawar​.navy​.mil/​r​o​b​o​ts/.
6. As a research plat­form, ROBART III is one of the most sophis­ti­cated mobile robots in the world.
7. It has been fea­tured numer­ous times on the History and Discovery Channels.
8. The basic thrust of the research is an abil­ity to enter and map a com­pletely unknown envi­ron­ment, with­out get­ting lost.
9. The sec­ondary thrust is to develop a vision-​​controlled weapons sys­tem that is self tar­get­ing [sic].
10. The pneumatically-​​powered non-​​lethal weapon is for demon­stra­tion pur­poses only.
11. It sup­ports the vision-​​based weapon con­trol research with­out undue risk to per­son­nel.
12. The third research thrust is to develop a nat­ural lan­guage inter­face that elim­i­nates the need for a robotic con­troller.
13. You can read about the tech­ni­cal details at http://​www​.spawar​.navy​.mil/​r​o​b​o​t​s​/​p​u​b​s​/​s​p​i​e​5​6​0​9​-​3​3​.​pdf.
14. In try­ing to be cute, you have seri­ously mis­led your read­ers, and lost your tech­ni­cal credibility.

THERE’S MORE: Ah, what are friends for? Over in the Defense Tech forum, the Arms Control Wonk gets my back. And gets nasty.

April 18th, 2005 | Drones | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.