On Oct. 27, 2004, a suicide bomber riding a motorcycle blew himself up alongside a U.S. Army flatbed truck in Balad, in north-central Iraq. The blast killed the truck’s driver, Staff Sgt. Jerome Lemon, from the South Carolina-based 1052nd Transportation Company.
Nearly five years later, at a sandy outdoor range at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an unassuming orange-and-black-painted forklift approached and lifted a pallet of mock munitions, as an audience of Army officers looked on. It might have looked like any day at any austere supply depot, but for one thing: the forklift had no driver.
While separated by years and thousands miles, there’s a direct link between Lemon’s tragic death and the robotic forklift’s quiet feat. From warehouses to highways to supply depots, the Pentagon is working hard to replace human logisticians like Lemon with machines that cannot be killed. After several years of intensive development, the first supply bots are just beginning to crawl and fly towards battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A story from War is Boring.
MUHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Robo future is getting here.
However, while I'm excited about the idea of being able to radically downsize the logistics portion of the army (less guys and gals on the tail end and more combatants), this has enormous potential for the civie sector. Just imagine what we could do at the dock yards! You could completely shift the workers away from unloading to inspecting. Even that could be automated in a way.
We need construction and produce picking bots still.
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