About a year ago, we calmly speculated about the implications that a slug-eating robot might have for us delicious humans.
Recently, there have been reports of the development of a steam-powered robot that can fuel itself by consuming any organic material in its path, from leaves to twigs to (gulp) humans. Now might be a good time to panic, at least if you value your body with its flesh intact.
According to the developers of the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot, appropriately abbreviated EATR, the bot could live independently for years on old furniture, dead animals and, of course, human corpses, which provide the greatest fuel of all. Fox News reports:
EATR… which uses an “external combustion chamber” burning up fuel to heat up water in a closed loop, generating electricity….
Upon the EATR platform, the Pentagon could build all sorts of things — a transport, an ambulance, a communications center, even a 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.
Essentially benign? We’re not so sure about that.
Related Content:
Science Not Fiction: Hungry Robots. What Could Go Wrong?
Discoblog: New Humanoid Robot Shows More Emotion Than Some Humans
Discoblog: Japan’s “Child Robot” Learns to Walk
DISCOVER: 20 Things You Didn’t Know About Robots
DISCOVER: When Robots Live Among Us
Image: flickr / Tellumo
July 15th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
A robot that eats people? sounds like a decepticon to me.
July 15th, 2009 at 10:18 pm
I think a wood gas generator would be more efficient. An external fire heats a simi-enclosed tank that has wood chips, twigs, small branches, corn, which produces a gas (it’s also called producer gas with coal) that feeds directly into the engine, with about 60% power of the power rating with gasoline. Check it out at wikipedia and you-tube.
July 15th, 2009 at 11:39 pm
Sounds efficient.
July 16th, 2009 at 8:38 am
Sounds terrible
If it can be programmed to eat the dead , it may also be hacked to kill anyone
July 16th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
If Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot could build one small enough to roll itself around in the tunnels of gopher warrens, a platoon of them might patrol the tunnels, eliminating the gophers, eating the energy-rich parts of the gophers, thus solving the gardeners’ perennial gopher problem.
July 16th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
If this thing is made stationary, like a cremation oven, then it’s just a cremation oven that produces electricity in the process, electricity that can power scrubbers to trap particle emissions during the process, etc. It doesn’t have to be mobile, though it could be.
July 16th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
I said, “golfers, golfers – not gophers”.
On a more serious note – glad the Germans did not have this idea in world war II.
July 16th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
On a battlefield, humans would be the most abundant power supply – decimate the enemy AND charge your batteries. Win – Win – Win. The Terror in the enemy would be quite high.
July 17th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
don’t these already exist? they are called republicans.
July 17th, 2009 at 7:37 pm
Yeah, republicans eat the whole thing. Better than those wasteful zombie democrats that just eat the brain.
July 18th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Politicians may eat everything in sight, but they return nothing, like the black holes they are…………
July 21st, 2009 at 12:10 pm
[...] the robot that was reported to feed on human corpses? Turns out the bot actually wouldn’t be programmed to eat flesh at all. Instead, it would [...]
July 21st, 2009 at 1:39 pm
are they planning on killing us all off and taking care of the evidence
July 22nd, 2009 at 11:52 pm
Under Obama’s plan, the elderly and “hopeless, expensive” cases will be euthanized, so what better way to dispose of the bodies?
It’s so green.
As in Soylent.