Those who have watched the Tremors series of sci-fi horror movies are going to love what the US Army is doing. In the second movie of the series, Tremors II: Aftershocks, the heroes used remote controlled toy trucks and tanks to distract the monsters away from the heroes.
According to James Dunnigan's Strategypage.com, Life is now imitating Art:
December 31, 2005: The latest bomb disposal robot is a modified remote control dump truck. Called a “BomBot,” the vehicle is equipped with a vidcam that can move independently, a custom control unit that can make the truck move more precisely and a longer range of operation. Basic drill for a BomBot it to approach (at speeds of up to 15 meters a second) a potential bomb, check it out via the vidcam, and then activate the rear part of the truck to dump a small, remote control, explosive next to the IED, and move away. The explosive is detonated, destroying the IED. The BomBots cost about $32,000 each (mostly for R&D and developing the custom components), and about 300 of them are being built for overseas service.
UPDATE: Defense Industry Daily has a fuller feature re: the whole BomBot story, and adds links to other coverage of the US military land robot projects. Further good news: Dunnigan's pricing may be high.








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