DARPA Funds Flesh Eating EATR Robot

Sci-Fi Science News — By endymi0n on July 10, 2009

Once again, just because we have the money to build these things and the dark and evil inner thoughts to conceive them, doesn’t mean we should be building them. Science Fiction writers have for years been telling horrific tales of our machines deciding that mankind is no longer needed thank you.

It’s as if money guys go to see Terminator and say, gee, we could build that! What a cool idea! In their latest folly, soon to haunt us all as we run screaming from it, arms akimbo, is the EATR robot under construction by the spectacularly well funded DARPA. EATR powers itself by eating flesh, either plant or animal. It rumbles along merrily using it’s steam based engine and when it gets hungry it scoops up Grandma or Aunt Flo in it’s giant maw and several muffled screams of agony later and now topped up, it continues barreling along doing worse evil. If that’s possible.

I suppose they want this thing to just be able to exist in the field for long periods without refueling. Even now though, in your minds eye, you see the real Science Fiction movie where these things move fast and dash out of the shadows, steam from the consumption of your neighbor streaming out it’s blowhole as it makes ready to clamp onto your favorite body part. Thanks Gizmodo for the advance warning.

EATR


    3 Comments

  • sharonedreyer says:

    The movie, Runaway with Tom Selleck, comes to mind. Even with robots to do the work, there is the human factor that these same robots will need to be repaired or captured and deactivated. This is a very interesting article. Glad I found it today. Check out my first and recently released novel, Long Journey to Rneadal. This exciting tale is a romantic action adventure in space and is more about the characters than the technology.

  • I'm one of the people working on EATR, and to be quite brief, EATR is designed to find and process vegetable matter only, and frankly will work best with dead leaves, twigs, and grass. It has no ability to do anything with proteins or animal matter at all. You can think of it as an electronic pack horse, that fuels itself by grazing.

    There is a more information on my blog:
    http://mrrobot0.blogspot.com
    along with some better pictures.

    • endymi0n says:

      Thanks for writing us Mr. Govers. I assumed it would just use plant material for fuel. I used a little Sci-Fi drama in the post. Best of luck to you.

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