The things you can do when you don't have to tackle child poverty or provide healthcare for all.
Its probably because of my Euro socialist identity but all I see is wasteful spending.
The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
51–60 of 173 posts
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh I want one of those "Timberjack" machines. (well without the timber cutting stuff). Based on some of the papers I found on the OSU project it seems like you could replace the entire computing infrastructure it was carrying around with about one pound (1/2 kg) of computers. I don't suppose you have a pointer to an IK paper on the 4-bar linkages do you? Looks like something that might be fun to cons up with servos.
There are quite a few quadruped robots that use them for legs: https://youtu.be/2k5lOUGenkE
Now that's a more modern way to use a four-bar linkage. The ASV used it to simplify the kinematic problem, which is doing arithmetic with big steel connecting rods. That little quadruped is using it to get two degrees of freedom without the first actuator having to carry the mass of the second one.
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
yeah, a single M1 Abrams tank costs over $4 million, and we have 9000 of them. DARPA R&D money always feels like money better spent than a lot of other military spending. We get future dividends, often civilian.
Absolutely this. With the culling of most corporate R&D groups over the last 20-30 years, DARPA pie-in-the-sky research projects seem to be one of the last real sources for investigating anything that can't be immediately and quickly monetized.
How much real research, as opposed to early-stage product development, has ever happened at corporations? We can easily name a few specific examples (Bell Labs, Xerox PARC) presumably because they weren't the norm. (And there were doubtless some others at companies that weren't as aligned with what's thought of as today's tech industry such as DuPont.)
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#54Oh, that thing. Back when I was into legged locomotion, I found out more about that machine than I ever wanted to know. The designer was really into four-bar linkages. The leg mechanism is set up so that one actuator moves the leg in X, one in Y, and one in Z, with a four-bar linkage encoding that into the leg position. This simplifies the control problem, while complicating the mechanics. I suspect they wanted to be…
A modern timber harvester run by a skilled operator is beautifully terrifying.
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#55Hey, guys, you ever see that really old movie, Empire Strikes Back?
Moral of that story: these things are weak to cable tripping.
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
yeah, a single M1 Abrams tank costs over $4 million, and we have 9000 of them. DARPA R&D money always feels like money better spent than a lot of other military spending. We get future dividends, often civilian.
What are you talking about? Everyone is poor and miserable, families arent making rent. My uncle was just dumpster diving to feed his family two months ago. They're wasting the people's money over at DARPA.
Talk to the American people who will not vote on a candidate that insists on cutting funding to the military industrial complex (of which DARPA gets a very small percentage anyway) and the American people who hate the "welfare state" and "socialism," both of which would make it possible for your uncle to get assistance from the government via taxes.
Data: DARPA's 2019 funding was $3.556 Billion dollars. DoD budget for 2019 was $616.2 Billion dollars.
Lastly, a lot of DARPA's research actually gets used for projects that benefit the public. Other people already listed a ton of projects like GPS, so I wont do that here.
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the choice of your fellow citizens who'd rather spend money on weapons than feed people, and will come up with elaborate stories about why your uncle deserves to be in that position. :(
," he said, on an ARPA-funded network.
"My uncle is starving while defence projects get lots of money" and "Some defence projects have led to good outcomes for society".
Without aiming to insult here¹, is it interesting to anyone that the same things we say when we're 14-15 years old are the same things we say decades later? I remember having had this argument when I was a kid (and very space-obsessed) and it was almost exactly like this. I remember my classroom, even, and it was between Physics and English and the teacher hadn't come in yet.
It's like some number of people have to be thrown into the war of the ideas periodically to preserve the battle lines exactly as they are. Stop and you lose ground.
¹ like not saying I'm better than you guys, I could just as well do what you're doing.
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#58Oh, that thing. Back when I was into legged locomotion, I found out more about that machine than I ever wanted to know. The designer was really into four-bar linkages. The leg mechanism is set up so that one actuator moves the leg in X, one in Y, and one in Z, with a four-bar linkage encoding that into the leg position. This simplifies the control problem, while complicating the mechanics. I suspect they wanted to be…
About the timber harvester: I assume better here is meant from a economical perspective, because from a ecological perspective the walkers are superior, as they do not devestate the ground so much. But that is sadly not really a issue for most wood production, but I could imagine, with rising awareness for the forests, market demand for not so intrusive wood harvesting(along with advances in the field in general) could bring the walking timber harvester back.
I would very much welcome it. I really hate, having all the forests paths messed up in the wood cutting season.
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
What return? Dead people? Pollution? Fear?
Some notable ones off the top of my head include the Internet, GPS, computer mice (and basically the foundation of UI that uses them), onion routing, and prosthetic limbs. Compare DARPA's $3B budget to e.g. the DoD's $650-700B budget. You can argue that either or both should be spending some portion of their budget on "the people" in a myriad of ways, but that argument gets way too close to personal politics for an e…
With the exception of prosthetic limbs, so far those technologies have proven to be net negatives for humanity, only accelerating our suicide:
GPS: Nuclear missile guidance system
Internet: distributed nuclear missile command and control system
Computer mice: windows
Onion routing: fbi honeypot, enabled multiple violent insurgencies in northern africa and southwest asia.
And the list of actual successful darpa projects is longer than the one you provided, and the omissions are not nearly as benign as the ones you have cherry-picked.
And that's just what made it out of the lab. How many full ride college scholarships have they left on the cutting room floor? How many insulin shots? How many pounds of fresh food? C'mon man. DARPA makes war, not life.
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#60Oh, that thing. Back when I was into legged locomotion, I found out more about that machine than I ever wanted to know. The designer was really into four-bar linkages. The leg mechanism is set up so that one actuator moves the leg in X, one in Y, and one in Z, with a four-bar linkage encoding that into the leg position. This simplifies the control problem, while complicating the mechanics. I suspect they wanted to be…
A modern timber harvester run by a skilled operator is beautifully terrifying.
I once camped wild with a friend in the middle of a forest. The next morning there was sawing in the distance, no worries. Got closer and closer ... so we hurried to pack our things .. just in time to have our camping place vanished as it was in the path of destruction. I was not aware before how fast they could be.
(and I don't know, if we just had bad luck, or he had fun messing us, but we were quite hidden)