Could war spider bots become a reality? There’s some buzz in the media this week about the global military contractor BAE Systems announcing that it will lead “a large alliance of American academics in building an army of miniature robots to aid the US military.” The effort, known as Micro Autonomous Systems and Technology (MAST), will receive $38m of US Army funding.

According to The Register:
“Robotic platforms extend the warfighter’s senses and reach, providing operational capabilities that would otherwise be costly, impossible, or deadly to achieve,” said Dr. Joseph Mait, MAST supremo at the US Army Research Lab.

The idea is that a variety of crawling or flying mini-droids will be produced, able to go into situations where human troops might fear to tread - caves, bunkers, mountains, hostile urban areas etc. The robo-bug army would then spy out targets and intel for human commanders to act upon.

Whether or not the robots will in fact look like spiders is up for debate. Though it is rather ironic considering the storyline for Patrick Farley’s online comic called The Spiders which shows an alternative reality where “President Gore deploys an army of citizen-telecontrolled robot spies to Afghanistan after the attacks of 9/12.”

Of course, Star Wars fans have already seen their fair share of spider-influenced war machines and robots including the Homing Spider Droid, the Dwarf Spider Droid and the Buzz Droid.

Read the full article here:
BAE lands US Army minidroid horde contract (The Register)

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SOURCE: Boing Boing Gadgets

This entry was posted on April 30, 2008 at 3:51 pm and is filed under in the media, robots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.