DARPA is testing a robotic mule that that will be able to carry 400 pounds of gear on a rough 20 mile trip without being refueled. The robot is called “LS3” and is a four-legged, headless beast of a robot.

DARPA is hoping that the robot will someday be able to follow voice commands and follow troops into the thick of combat.

The YouTube video description details the robot:

To help alleviate the impact of excess weight on troops, DARPA is developing a highly mobile, semi-autonomous four-legged robot, the Legged Squad Support System (LS3). LS3 includes onboard sensors to perceive obstacles in its environment and path-planning capabilities to avoid them. The LS3 platform is designed with the squad in mind and is therefore significantly quieter, faster and has a much higher carrying capacity for longer mission durations than DARPA’s earlier mobility technology demonstrator BigDog.

“If successful, this could provide real value to a squad while addressing the military’s concern for unburdening troops,” said Army Lt. Col. Joe Hitt, program manager DARPA. “LS3 seeks to have the responsiveness of a trained animal and the carrying capacity of a mule.”

The LS3 also acts as a mobile recharging station for troops needing to recharge batteries for radios, tablets or laptops.

An 18-month test period will kick off this summer. If successful, it will deployed with Marines stationed around the world.

Have a video of the new robot in action:

Before you ask, yes, the robot actually does ingest matter and excretes it out. Scientists working at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory invented a robot that powers itself by ingesting food and water, digesting it and then releasing the leftover waste just as a human does.

“Robots that eat biological fuels could find enough fuel almost anywhere,” John Greenman, a scientist at the laboratory, told SA. “There is organic matter anywhere on Earth — leaves and soil in the forest, or even human waste such as urine and feces.”

The robot is called EcoBot and has been around since 2003. The first EcoBot fed off of E. coli bacteria that fed on refined sugars. The EcoBot-II used sludge microbes to digest dead flies, prawn shells and rotten apples. The latest model, EcoBot-III, is the robot that dumps the leftover waste it “digests.” If it didn’t do this, the robot would become poisoned by its own waste and stop working.

The scientists claim that these robots can keep operating for upwards of 30 years as long as they have food to eat.

The team has received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for their work. They hope to turn the robots into a machine that can tackle both sanitation and energy needs in poor countries that need it the most.

NASA is also eyeing the technology for extended space travel. If the robots can survive off of human waste, they would be the perfect companion for astronauts traveling to distant planets like Mars.

Fortunately for humanity, the robots can only perform tasks in short bursts before needing to recharge again. Once the technology improves, however, we can expect robots to eat everything on the earth in their tireless domination of the human species.

[Original lead image courtesy of NineInchNachos’ flickr]

Assisted by a small camera connected to the endoscope, the medical puppeteer can see what’s inside the patient’s stomach and at the same time control the robotic arms all while staring at a monitor.

Enterologist Larry Ho said:

“Our movements [humans] are very huge and if you want to make very fine movements, your hands will tremble … But robots can execute very fine movements without trembling.”

Ho is employed at Singapore’s National University Hospital. He says the robot helped remove early-stage gastric cancer in 5 patients. In addition it only took a fraction of the time, using the robot, than it did manually or by hand.

One source says gastric cancer is the second leading cause of cancer related deaths across the globe and is quite common in east Asia. Diagnosis for the disease usually occurs in the later stages. At that point the cancer is difficult to treat.

Ho developed the robot along with Louis Phee who is an associate professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological Institute’s school of mechanical and space engineering. The design for the robot came after the two had crab for dinner one evening. Sydney Chong, the person with whom they were having dinner suggested the device be modeled after the crab. So, Ho and Phee decided to take the advice of Chang and thus the robot crab was born. Ho had this to say about Chung’s Suggestion:

“He suggested we used the crab as as a prototype. The crab can pick up sand and its pincers are very strong.

Ho went on to comment about the crab device saying:

“Many things are a certain way because they have evolved and adapted to certain functions … we created something that followed the human anatomy and borrowed ideas from nature and incorporated the two.”

Science has found a way, according to MSNBC, to convert the sugars in a cockroaches belly into electricity through a fuel cell. Once fuel cells are shrunk enough to be non-invasive to cockroaches, they can be implanted to power sensors or recording devices.

Daniel Scherson, a chemist at Case Western Reserve University, explains how the nightmare fuel will be powered. A rechargeable battery is inserted alongside a biofuel cell that would store the small amount of energy it generates.

“If you want to be futuristic, one may use the energy stored to try to control the neurological system of the cockroach and then you might be able to (control) the cockroach (with) a joystick,” Scherson told MSNBC.

The alarming research points to a future of cockroach spies. Controllable cockroaches scurrying around being not only disgusting, but also spy equipment from the CIA.

Looking deeper into the research, the scientists reveal that a cockroach’s diet is the main power source behind the electricity it can generate. This makes other forms of harnessing electricity, such as through movement, obsolete.

The fuel cell developed by the team uses a series of reactions by enzymes to break down the sugar into electricity. The first enzyme breaks down the sugar produced by the cockroach into two simpler sugars. The second enzyme oxidizes the two simple sugars. This releases electrons that are funneled together to electrodes.

The team tested it by inserting prototype electrodes into the belly of a female cockroach. The biofeul cell 0.2 volts of electricity. While not a huge amount, it’s the first baby step to the creation of robot cockroach monsters.

The scientists have noble goals for now with this new found technology. They hope to equip social insects like bees or ants with sensors that can detect dangerous chemicals.

The battery operating at 0.2 volts is enough to send a message by a few inches. Theoretically, you could line up a bunch of ants and play a wicked game of telephone to spy on potential criminals.

This does bring into question what science will do once they develop true robot cockroaches or ants that can’t be killed by radiation or big guns. The world will not end with zombies, but rather robot cockroaches. Regardless, the technology is still pretty impressive. It just terrifies me.

Research indicates that humans gradually lose interest in interactive robots after a few weeks. Dr. Nikolaos Mavridis, Lab director at IRML, hopes to change that by studying how humans interact with a robot on the social web.

"An existing robot equipped with face recognition, a simple dialog system, and a real-time Facebook connection will be deployed, and will encounter humans in the environment of our lab," according to the IRML website.

"The robot will create a personal entry for itself in Facebook. Upon meeting a human it has not encountered before, it will ask for his/her name, and search for him in Facebook. Upon finding him, the human’s Facebook entries (age, home town, profession) will serve as a starting point for simple dialogs."

The robot is named and modeled after Arabic scholar Ibn Sina aka Avicenna. The robots interactions with humans will be logged on its Facebook profile.

"Upon further future encounters, the robot will also use memories from past encounters with the human as a point of conversation (‘remember last Sunday when…’)," according to IRML.

"As the human and the robot are embedded in a social web, possible co-acquaintances between the robot and the human will be exploited too: encounters with and / or information about mutual friends will also be used: (‘I saw Michael yesterday’)."
 

The search engine could have another avenue for gathering information from the world it sees. A pair of Google’s engineers applied for a patent that would enable machines to read text included in pictures.

An InformationWeek report said the patent would allow tasks like searching videos by keywords appearing in the content, as one example.

“The method includes receiving an input of one or more image search terms and identifying keywords from the received one or more image search terms,” said the patent abstract.

“The method also includes searching a collection of keywords including keywords extracted from image text, retrieving an image associated with extracted image text corresponding to one or more of the image search terms, and presenting the image.”

Pulling off a technology that could do this would be quite a feat. Google’s patent goes beyond typical optical character recognition, where documents are scanned and read by software. In a real world full of myriad typefaces and languages, it seems Google will have a challenge in implementing the patent, should they have plans to do so.

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