Gadgets are getting smaller. Materials are getting lighter. But the modern foot soldier is lugging a bigger load than ever. The U.S. Army is hoping to take some of this weight off with a new-fangeled beast of burden. The Future Force Warrior program’s Robotic Mule will be able to go wherever the infantry go, carrying supplies and ammunition and giving them somewhere to plug in their rechargers.
One approach to the Mule is to build a four-legged robot very much like the biological version — or some sort of wheeled equivalent. But there is another way, and this is where Danny Hillis of Applied Minds comes in. Hillis is best known for developing the parallel processing that underlies most modern supercomputers, but has been active in many different fields. His idea is to develop something that is part wheel, part leg, combining the strengths of both. It’s not a matter of reinventing the wheel so much as repackaging it.
Robo-Mule Gets Wheel, Leg Blend (Defense Tech)
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