Military developing robots that could feed on corpses

Posted by PUPPETGOV on Jul 15th, 2009 and filed under Sci/Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

EATR robots roam a barren landscape as an unmanned drone flies overhead in an artist's rendering.
~Fox News

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.

Read the full article here>>
http://blog.puppetgov.com/2009/07/15/military-developing-robots-that-could-feed-on-corpses/

Click here for a brief description of EATR at the Robotic Technology Web site.>>
http://www.robotictechnologyinc.com/index.php/EATR

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