The Geek Church

What you are seeing to the right here is the AlphaDog, a project from Boston Dynamics that is also known as the LS3 (Legged Squad Support System). This is a military experiment from our friends at DARPA, and it is what you think it is, a walking robot.

I believe that the purpose of the AlphaDog is to essentially do the heavy lifting of ground-based soldiers. I can’t help but think of the movie Starship Troopers, and how there were ground troops on uninhabitable planets that were full of insects who wanted nothing more than to kill humans. And why did we not just nuke the planet from above? It really is the only way to be sure.

Anyway, the AlphaDog is really something out of science fiction that resembles a robot horse of some kind. You can watch a video after the jump of the AlphaDog in action, and it handle itself pretty well outside. It does stumble a bit on some terrain, and it certainly is loud. If someone does intend to use the AlphaDog for military applications, then you should know that all that noise would most certainly give away its position.

Should I look forward to days when big guns will be put on these AlphaDogs to be carried? Should I look forward to days when these quadruped robots will have big guns that they will shoot. Yeah, that is a Terminator scenario with Star Wars machinery, but if such a situation every does really arise, let’s not be stupid and act all surprised, like we never saw it coming. It seems rather portentous that we named this AlphaDog.

Tags: Boston Dynamics, Legged Squad support System, LS3

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 9th, 2012 at 8:00 am and is filed under Military Technology, Robot technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.