Army Navigates Bomb Hunting Robot via Xbox 360 Controller
That’s a pretty awesome picture, is it not? It’s the Army’s latest bomb seeking robot which explores houses for explosives and trip wires, keeping actual soldiers out of harms way. It’s DNA is an amalgam of an Xbox 360, a Roomba, and Nintendo’s R.O.B. the Robot.
“Spec. Ronald Wagle is a 23-year-old video gamer turned grunt… The handheld gizmo he uses to control a robot “is almost exactly the same as an Xbox [360] controller,” he said.
Wagle uses the controller to deftly steer the robot, whose camera-equipped head gives it more than a passing resemblance to the R2-D2 robot in Star Wars, to check buildings in the village for weapons, including trip wires that could set off an improvised explosive device.
The robot, built by iRobot Corp., the same company that makes the Roomba vacuum cleaner, features cameras that can see in daylight and dark, has flexible treads that allow it to climb stairs, and radio links…”
I really hope the trigger buttons control gatling guns on its arms, but unless they’re really well hidden, I doubt it.
[via Gamepolitics]
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[...] The Army steers bomb robot with Xbox controller – [Double Kill] [...]
I spent a couple of weeks with U.S. Army EOD unit in Iraq a few years back (“the Baghdad Bomb Squad”.) They used robots like the one above. The soldiers spent a good chunk of their down time playing Halo 2 on the X-Box.
The commander of the unit gave me a great quote for the story, which I will more or less accurately quote from memory: “My soldiers who are best at controlling the robots,” he told me, “Are the best Halo 2 players.”
It’s good to see it all has come full circle.