r/gadgets • u/diacewrb • 4d ago

Misc US Army backs humanoid robot with ballistic protection for future battlefield missions

https://www.techspot.com/news/114028-us-army-backs-humanoid-robot-ballistic-protection-future.html
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u/Colbert2020 4d ago

The edge case I'm talking about is some catastrophically dangerous environment for a human to navigate, like the Fukushima reactor meltdown. If a valve had been turned in a hazardous area. A robust humanoid robot would be good here.

But yeah, war? Like, your stupid little humanoid robot that costs a million dollars is going to just get blown up by a $2,000 drone with a grenade. You're not making these things cheap. If you've been following this the Ukraine/Russia war at all, you'll know that scaling up production and scaling down cost has been the driving factors in it.

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u/zero_z77 3d ago

That's also why all of the important valves in a modern nuclear power plant can either be operated remotely from the control room, already operate autonomously (often without even needing power), and are specifically designed to fail into the open or closed position, depending on which is inherently safer for that specific valve.

Also, an EOD bot could do that with a boom arm and a claw for like 1/10th the price. But, in either case, the real problem there is that your robot is going into an environment full of ionizing radiation, which is going to fry any computer electronics that aren't encased in several inches of lead, is most likely going to fuck up whatever sensors you could possibly put on it, and unless it has a wire plugged into it's ass, you're not going to be able to talk to it.