If robots ever hope to rise up and enslave their human masters, it's going to take no small amount of teamwork to get the job done, and luckily for our future overlords, DARPA's shelling out serious loot to endow them with just the tools they'll need. The agency's latest foray into robotic empowerment comes courtesy of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, who recently demonstrated a platform that allows multiple heterogeneous bots to communicate with one another and use a sort of AI "group think" to find and presumably terminate specified targets. In a beta test at Fort Benning's mock urban landscape, the Penn researchers deployed four so-called Clodbuster autonomous ground vehicles along with a fixed-wing UAV overhead, and tasked the team with using their cameras, GPS receivers, and wireless radios to identify and locate a series of bright orange boxes. Unfortunately, after the successful completion of their mission, the bots decided to hit up the base bar to celebrate, where after several drinks they reportedly went AWOL and were last spotted attacking orange traffic cones in downtown Columbus.
posted Jun 14th 2006 11:32AM
It's official, hell has frozen over.
Uhhh Oh, can someone say: MATRIX
I for one welcome our robot overlords
I thought the robots were already running things.
That's awesome....
Judgement Day is unavoidable. Our only chance is to survive it.
I would think it would be a lot more impressive feat to find something that was bright orange. I don't know of many miliatries that have bright orange camo.
Cool nonetheless.
* wasn't *
"Johnny 5 alive! Do not disassemble Johnny 5!"
And though it has been said before, I reiterate: "I for one welcome our robot overlords."
Episode III's "executive order 66" anyone?
Next on item on the shopping list:
50-cal Rifle
Terminate these Bastages!
All this robot stuff is great, but when are they going to have one that will mow my year. Make my life more managable -- now! The added benifit of pulling weeds would be nice too .. and if they could plant flowers, ohh and scoop up dog messes, and paint the house ..
That should be 'Robots learn teamwork; uprising imminent,' or something along those lines. As written, it means that the robots learned that an uprising is imminent, not that a robot uprising is imminent.
to Pito189,
Not many countries have bright orange camo, but if those cameras were replaced with infra-red, your body heat would show up bright orange.
--KurtRoedeger
I've been to Columbus; those traffic cones had it coming.
The nation of Zero-One will propose. Man will grow jealous.
That is when we will scorch the sky and begin our downfall.
Clodbuster autonomous ground vehicles?
That looks like a Tamiya TXT-1 chassis to me.
I just came across the long-term DARPA project briefing, and it looks something like this:
(1) Build autonomous robots
(2) Make automonous robots work together
(3) Make autonomous, cooperative robots transform and combine to form one giant robot
(4) Defeat the Autobots and rule the world!
It all comes down to one thing: Dick Cheney has got his sights on the energon market.
2020 Skynet becomes self aware
You people are nuts. If developed in labs that follow the industry's rules, these robots are designed to aid humans, not harm them.
Except when those humans are enemy targets. Who defines what humans qualify as the enemy? And what if a robot was able to override that decision making most humans the enemy.
>And what if a robot was able to override that
>decision making most humans the enemy.
"It will be 9/11 times 2,356."
"My god, that's... I don't even know what that is."
"Nobody does."