I'm surprised no one had mentioned the "Spidertron" that was included the recent 1.0 release of Factorio.
The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
81–90 of 173 posts
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your uncle is dumpster diving for food I doubt he pays any taxes after refunds.
We're in a global depression you bougie piece of shit. Don't shit talk my family.
Yes, we are, and despite that global depression normal people continue to have polite conversations.
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#83I have many books on on robotics and AI from Stanford and MIT from that era, back when I started to get deeply involved in the field. My son is about a year away from graduating with degrees in CS and Robotics. He was quite surprised to realize that much of what he is learning today isn't new at all. Tremendous work was done decades ago in both domains. Put simply, you can only get so far with neural networks when yo…
It's under-appreciated just how brilliant the initial set of AI and Robotics pioneers were. Our future lies in the past. Would you be open to digitizing these books via the Internet Archive, or something similar? If they're sufficiently technical, you may have the only copy in the world for some of them.
Some of these books are still around ih various forms, for example:
https://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Artificial-Intelligence-Avro...
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/parallel-distributed-processi...
https://www.amazon.com/Neural-Massively-Parallel-Computers-B...
https://www.amazon.com/Connection-Machine-Press-Artificial-I...
https://www.amazon.com/Legged-Robots-Balance-Artificial-Inte...
https://www.amazon.com/Machines-That-Walk-Adaptive-Suspensio...
...and more.
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#84Earlier 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.
Fusion researchers will read that and feel like chopped liver.
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I feel for you, but military spending is a massive federal jobs program. Each job created has a job multiplier effect, creating additional jobs in the surrounding area. Manufacturing jobs producing military equipment have a much bigger job multiplier effect. So if you were to wave a magic wand and half military spending overnight, the economic impact would be disastrous, and many more people would be in dire economic…
That doesn't seem to be an issue for other Western countries with much smaller militaries (per capita).
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel for you, but military spending is a massive federal jobs program. Each job created has a job multiplier effect, creating additional jobs in the surrounding area. Manufacturing jobs producing military equipment have a much bigger job multiplier effect. So if you were to wave a magic wand and half military spending overnight, the economic impact would be disastrous, and many more people would be in dire economic…
So what if we used military construction money on schools and education? Or maybe capturing carbon? Plenty of useful things to the world we could spend the money on. No need to just cut spending and bank the money.
My comment was in reply to the GP's statement that it was a waste of money. When the federal government gives out money, it has a ripple effect as that money is spent on goods and services. Creating a service-based job will have a larger ripple effect, and creating a manufacturing job generally has the largest ripple effect.
So if you have a magic wand or just happen to become dictator, please keep in mind the multiplier effects when deciding where to spend the money. ;-)
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#87Man, now I really want one of those computer boxes. Looks like the boards are common, but the mil spec case might not be.
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#88Only millions? Amazing! To actually deliver a physical, one-of-a-kind, working vehicle of that scale & novel function, for low-digit millions, seems pretty impressive to me - especially if the effort documented enough of their choices/discoveries/limitations to help inform later efforts.
Colin Furze could probably do this for less than 50,000£, and it would even spit fire!
I love that guy, and you're right. So many of his projects is him trying find a different way to locomote a flame thrower.
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
Have a look at MSR.
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#90Oh, 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…
Tangential but I find it interesting how the old ad shows the machine and explains why it is interesting while the new one has detail shots, buzzwords and epic music.
I guess it’s just to catch the eye and then one can find all the info later, but still.