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Soldiers of the future will climb walls like Spider-Man
The mad scientists at DARPA are encouraged to come up with crazy schemes to provide the US with an edge in future military campaigns. It looks as if the Z-Man Program, presumably subtitled "project make soldiers climb walls like Spider-man," has come to a successful conclusion. Copying the physical structure of a Gecko's toe, a team at Draper Laboratory, Cambridge, Mass., has constructed a pair of paddles that enable a 218-pound human to scale a wall with a 50-pound load strapped to their back. Naturally, it'll be a while until we see snipers scaling enemy buildings with this sort of tech, but it's a damn sight more useful than suction cups or a strong rope and a lot of pulling.
Treebot climbs trees, is a robot (video)
Remember when you didn't consider climbing trees a chore? Treebot doesn't -- but then, it wasn't programmed to know boredom. The robot was designed by a team at The Chinese University of Hong Kong for the express purpose of shimmying up trees autonomously, figuring out the best route up a trunk using built-in touch sensors. The 'bot's body is designed like an inchworm, expanding and contracting as it works it way up -- unlike other climbers we've seen. Treebot can carry up to 3.7 pounds as it inches along, opening up the possibility of using the machine to prune hard to reach leaves. It can also shuffle up a variety of different plants, including bamboo stems, as evidenced by the sped-up video after the break. Unwieldy foliage, you've been put on notice.
The Mog Log: The worrying future of Final Fantasy XI
There's a growing unease in the Final Fantasy XI community. It's one of those subtle things that no one is willing to outright talk about, but it's still there, just beneath the surface of a surprising number of discussions. And it's a bit unusual for an MMO, because it's not fear or anxiousness about something being broken from the last update or an upcoming update. No, it's more about the question of whether the upcoming updates will be the last, or if there will even be any changes that could break something. There is an elephant in the room with a big number fourteen on its side, and while few fans of the game are upset that Final Fantasy XIV is coming... well, it raises no shortage of questions about the future of the game we're already playing. And it's not new. People were saying as far back as the leadup to the July update that something was rotten in the state of Jeuno. But when coupled with the promise that Final Fantasy XI isn't over... well, there's an excellent article that almost every fan needs to read on Allakhazam, summarizing what no small number of fans have been thinking. Where are we actually going to be when the dust clears?
Bioloid robot goes climbing on its own, will one day rip you from your hiding tree
It's a well documented fact that the Robot Apocalypse is only a matter of weeks, moments or scores away, but today we're facing the grim reality that it may already be underway in certain sections of Germany. Thanks to a tie-up between whiz kids at the Technical University of Dortmund and University of Manitoba, the so-called Bioloid you see above can actually scale walls on its own. As in, autonomously. The robot doesn't rely on a predefined motion sequence; instead, it looks up and figures out the most efficient way to get from the bottom to the top based on the X / Y positions of the grips. Future versions of the critter will utilize a full-on vision system, but hopefully we'll have outposts established on Mars by then in order to maintain some semblance of freedom. Peep the horror show after the break (if you must).
ICM's Climber robot ready to ascend
International Climbing Machines' Climber certainly isn't the first of its kind, but we'll admit, this thing can handle some pretty daunting tasks. After successfully lasting through a number of field deployments this year, this wall climber is reportedly ready to take on the world in assignments such as "climbing the surfaces of C-5 / C-137 airplanes, decontaminating a vessel in a Nuclear Power Plant and removing paint from concrete walls for the Department Of Energy." Apparently, this iteration trumps many similar alternatives due to its ability to scale ceilings, rounded / rough surfaces and overcome obstacles that protrude up to 1-inch from a given surface. The rig can be controlled from the ground with a handheld remote, and attachments can be added for painting, cleaning, drilling or just capturing imagery from above. Mum's the word on pricing, but feel free to check out a couple more shots after the jump.[Via Gizmag]
Put down that gamepad and climb a bloody tree!
British paper Daily Mail complains that kids aren't climbing trees anymore -- because they're playing video games. The story, which mentions trees and the climbing thereof no fewer than 13 times, reports that while the number of kids diagnosed with RSI (repetitive strain injury) has risen over the last seven years, "the number of children treated for falling out of trees" has dropped. Seriously. This is the basis for a newspaper article.The piece is a wistful reminiscence of days gone by -- the dewy-eyed headline is "PlayStation generation that will never climb a tree." More like, "Daily Mail longs for the time when 472 kids fell from trees every hour." Now that's a headline!We here at Joystiq are eagerly anticipating the year 3267, when Daily Mail will run a piece entitled "Zyfnort generation that will never hold a SixAxis." (The Zyfnort is a game console you control not with your hands, but, ironically enough, by repeatedly falling out of trees.)
Climber to wear HAL cyborg suit, carry quadriplegic man to summit
We're still waiting for someone to toss one of these HAL cyborg suits on and do battle with the forces of evil, but until then we'll have to celebrate the little things. Or not so little things, in this case. The "hybrid assistive limb" suits are going to be used by two mountaineers to ascend the peak of a Swiss mountain while carrying a 43-year old quadriplegic man and a 16-year old student with muscular dystrophy. The two climbers will start 930 feet below the summit, with one carrying the 43-year old Seiji Uchida on his back, and the other dragging the 16-year old Kyoga Ide in a sled. Sounds like quite the task, even with a muscle aiding cyborg suit, but we're sure the climbers could totally p0wn any ninjas that might come in between them and the summit.[Via The Raw Feed]
