Feral Jundi

Monday, August 17, 2009

Sunday, July 19, 2009

Cool Stuff: Carnivorous Robots — The Fly Stealing Robot

     I would love to have a few of these for contracts. lol  It seems everywhere you go for a deployment, there are usually flies or mosquitos.  So I applaud any devilish and ingenious ways of eradicating the things. I think this contraption takes the cake. –Matt

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Fly Stealing Robot

Carnivorous Robots Eager to Eat Your Pests

UK-based designers James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau believe that, if robots are ever to be welcomed into people’s homes, they’ll need to fit in with the rest of the furniture, and earn their keep. Their prototypes trap and digest (microbial fuel cell) pests like flies and mice to gain energy – see video demonstrating how they work.

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Fly-stealing robot

This robot is meant to appeal to people with a dark sense of humour.

Its design is intended to encourage spiders to build webs between the pegs on the backboard.

Any flies trapped in the web are tracked by a camera (right).

After no movement has been sensed for 10 minutes, the robotic arm (left) picks out the dead fly and drops it into the fuel cell, generating electricity to partially power the camera and robotic arm.

The robot gets the rest of its energy from a fuel cell housed underneath a conventional ultraviolet fly killer.

(Image: Auger-Loizeau)

Link here.

 

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Technology: Upcoming Military Robot Could Feed on Dead Bodies

Filed under: Cool Stuff,Technology — Tags: , , , , — Matt @ 8:49 PM

   This has to rank as one of the top technology posts here.  Robots feeding on dead bodies in war zones?  Interesting to say the least. Doug found this one by the way. –Matt

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Upcoming Military Robot Could Feed on Dead Bodies

Tuesday , July 14, 2009

It could be a combination of 19th-century mechanics, 21st-century technology — and a 20th-century horror movie.

A Maryland company under contract to the Pentagon is working on a steam-powered robot that would fuel itself by gobbling up whatever organic material it can find — grass, wood, old furniture, even dead bodies.

Robotic Technology Inc.’s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot — that’s right, “EATR” — “can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable,” reads the company’s Web site.

That “biomass” and “other organically-based energy sources” wouldn’t necessarily be limited to plant material — animal and human corpses contain plenty of energy, and they’d be plentiful in a war zone.

EATR will be powered by the Waste Heat Engine developed by Cyclone Power Technology of Pompano Beach, Fla., which uses an “external combustion chamber” burning up fuel to heat up water in a closed loop, generating electricity.

The advantages to the military are that the robot would be extremely flexible in fuel sources and could roam on its own for months, even years, without having to be refueled or serviced.

Upon the EATR platform, the Pentagon could build all sorts of things — a transport, an ambulance, a communications center, even a mobile gunship.

In press materials, Robotic Technology presents EATR as an essentially benign artificial creature that fills its belly through “foraging,” despite the obvious military purpose.

Story here.

• Click here for a brief description of EATR at the Robotic Technology Web site.

• Click here for a much longer overview of the project in PDF format.

• Click here to read about the Cyclone Waste Heat Engine.

Friday, July 10, 2009

Publications: IG Says SBInet Has Too Many Contractors

Filed under: Publications,Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Matt @ 9:17 PM

     Now I read through the report, and there was no mention of EODT using armed guards to protect the building of these sites, so that was not the ‘inherently governmental’ portion they were talking about.  They were talking about the contractors doing the job of upper level management of CBP, which to me is a no-brainer–no duh that is inherently governmental.  It’s also inherently lazy on the part of the CBP to not draft their own reports for congress to read.

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Sunday, June 21, 2009

PMC 2.0: MIL-STD-810, Millennial Veterans and Smart Phones For PMC’s

Filed under: PMC 2.0,Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Matt @ 1:22 AM

   I was debating on wether or not to put this under technology, but then I thought, this is far more important to PMC’s and PSC’s.  Look folks, the reality is, is that smart phones are going to be everywhere in the near future.  They already are for the most part, and if you look around, you will see many people using them. If the factor is price, even that is going down, and soon they will be as cheap as current GSM phones.  Even folks in Iran or Iraq are using smart phones, and as they get cheaper and more available, this technology will become even more important and relevant to the private military and security industry.

   And I would even argue, that smart phones will be essential tools for the security contractor of the future.  I have witnessed contractors use these phones, and they love them.  They can bring up Hushmail (free encrypted email), GPS so they can find airports or training facilities or do a convoy operation down the road in Iraq, they can talk to home via Skype (free VOIP service), browse the internet, do their banking, read the forums and blogs, check their Facebook account or follow some Tweets on Twitter–the uses are endless.  Hell, even on iPhone, you can get sniper windage and elevation calculation applications.

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