Ja! German Bot Spies By Satellite

Check it out, frauleins: The German Federal Armed Forces are exper­i­ment­ing with a pro­to­type, satellite-​​controlled robot that can go on recon mis­sions, while its human oper­a­tor hangs out in Berlin.
The satel­lite link, which can trans­mit video at 2 Mbps and receive con­trol chan­nel data up to 128 Kbps, makes the RoboScout some­thing of an odd­ball in the unmanned ground vehi­cle (UGV) world. As Peter J. Brown notes in the lat­est issue of Via Satellite mag­a­zine, satel­lite sig­nals are easy to lose in the urban canyons and forested areas where UGVs are likely to oper­ate. Plus, the uneven ground can cause the ‘bots to tilt by 20 or 30 degrees in one direc­tion or another — which means lock­ing onto a satel­lite gets even trick­ier. Most robot-​​makers go for radio-​​control, instead.
RoboScout was one of more than 20 UGVs shown off dur­ing May’s European Land-​​Robot Trial — sort of a Continental answer to Darpa’s Grand Challenge, but with­out the “‘win­ners’ and ‘losers,’” the orga­niz­ers note. The machines were put through a series of obsta­cles dur­ing their time under the Bundeswehr’s care in Hammelburg — “stairs, nar­row passes, and col­lapsed ceil­ings… as well as ditches, fences and fire.” And from the looks of the couple-​​thousand pic­tures taken at the event, RoboScout (and many of the other UGVs) han­dled them­selves rather well. Achtung!

June 30th, 2006 | Drones | 198810 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2006/06/30/ja-german-bot-spies-by-satellite/Ja%21+German+Bot+Spies+By+Satellite2006-06-30+13%3A19%3A36david_axe You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.