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DARPA’s Robot Hand Is Almost As Capable As What’s On Your Arm
Gone are the days when we could look at cutting-edge robots and at least take some satisfaction in the fact that the human body was still superior. It seems like DARPA is getting closer and closer to outdoing Mother Nature, this time with its ARM-H robot hand that’s as impressively dextrous as it is cheap and durable.
Watch DARPA’s Robot Arms Perform The World’s Slowest Pit Stop
Replacing fighter planes and reconnaissance aircraft with robotic drones turned out to be a far easier task for the military than replacing soldiers with bots. But DARPA remains determined to one day enlist robots for all military jobs, and, among other research, it’s working hard to develop a relatively low-cost set of artificial arms and hands that can perform everyday mundane tasks.
Monster Machines: CMU’s CHIMP Will Save Lives
The Fukushima Daiichi meltdown and other recent disasters like Deepwater Horizon highlight a very real need for robotic first responders that can operate in inhospitable environments. In response, DARPA recently issued a Robotics Challenge addressing the issue. Here’s the design that Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering centre (CMU NREC) hopes will take home the challenge’s $US2 million purse — and save lives some day.
Floating Swarm Bots Form Emergency Bridges, Runways, And Islands
Teamwork is a new concept in the field of robotics, but the idea of creating hundreds of cheap disposable robots that work together to complete a greater task has a lot of promise. So far swarm bots — as they’ve come to be known — have successfully tackled problems on land and in the air. But now DARPA wants them teaming up on oceans, lakes, and rivers too.
Watch The World’s Highest Resolution Drone-Mounted Camera In Action
Sure, your phone can take a decent picture, but it’s not even in the same universe as the best camera the government’s got. At 1.8 gigapixels, the DARPA-developed ARGUS-IS the highest resolution surveillance platform in the world, and, when mounted to a drone, can single-handedly do the work of an army of 100 predator drones watching the area of one medium-sized city..
DARPA Plans To Scan Puppy Brains To Find The Smartest Dogs For War
War dogs. They are equal parts badass and cute. And on top of that, they’re smart. They need to be to get the job done. In the interest of finding the cleverest canines for potential war-doggery, DARPA’s got a plan to start scanning puppy brains in an MRI machine. But rest assured, those brains are still in the puppies in question.
This Is How DARPA Will Strip Old Satellites For Parts
There’s a bunch of junk orbiting the Earth right now, a bunch of junk that we put there. But not all of the old satellites that are zooming around the planet are totally useless; plenty still have good stuff in them that could be reused and DARPA wants to start mining them.
Monster Machines: DARPA’s SeeMee Satellites
While UAVs have joined spy satellites as an indispensable part of America’s military operations, they are not the end-all-be-all perfect solution, even in coordination. That’s why DARPA plans to supplement these unmanned intelligence gathering platforms with jet-deployed constellations of micro-satellites. Soon, every grunt will have access to a real-time battlefield mini-map just in like video games.
