Robart III rent-a-cop drone
posted Mar 14th 2005 2:39PM
We're used to seeing unintentionally creepy robots, but not quite so often do we witness drones that are supposedly intentionally scary but ultimately laughable. The Robart III is a mechanical rent-a-cop replacement currently in prototype from the U.S. military's Space and Naval Warfare Systems. It detects intruders and caps 'em with a six-barrel Gatling-style tranquilizer (or rubber bullets, if that's your pleasure) gun. It uses head-mounted sensors of several varieties: two Polaroid sonar transducers, a Banner near-infrared proximity sensor, an AM Sensors microwave motion detector, topped off with a video surveillance camera. All this sex-appeal may backfire for the Robart III, who ends up looking like some comical mixture of a Dalek and Johnny Five. Robart III apparently has some new developers coming on board who want to develop a whole fleet of slave robots to accompany Robart III on its missions. We figure this troupe will either nab a bunch of bad guys, or perhaps end up with a starring role in the next Austin Powers movie.
Buy one and name him 'Jason'. Then he'd be 'Jason Robart'. Wonder if he'll do film?
This guy reminds me of the Nintendo Entertainment System's R.O.B.:
http://www.nesplayer.com/database/accessories/rob.htm
Robart has grown a bit, but is still pretty scary.
Scary cool that is. Gimme a bot with a gatling gun any old day.
The basic platform has been around for at least a couple of years now. It's good to see the design is flexible enough to allow the additional hardware it's aquired.
"Sarah Connor?"