Be afraid: DARPA unveils Terminator-like Atlas robot

Tim Hornyak
Cnet
July 17, 2013

If you’re short of nightmare fuel, say hello to Atlas.

On Thursday, DARPA unveiled this hulking, 6-foot robot developed by Boston Dynamics, creator of the infamous BigDog and other scary creatures. Surprisingly, the 330-pound terror is designed to help us meatsacks.

Atlas is a testbed humanoid for disaster response, but it looks like it knows its way around a phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range. Fortunately, it comes from Massachusetts, not the future.

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This article was posted: Wednesday, July 17, 2013 at 4:19 pm

Tags: domestic news, technology

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Scientists Are Developing Robot Farmers

Gosia Wozniacka and Terence Chea
Seattle Times
July 15, 2013

On a windy morning in California’s Salinas Valley, a tractor pulled a wheeled, metal contraption over rows of budding iceberg lettuce plants. Engineers from Silicon Valley tinkered with the software on a laptop to ensure the machine was eliminating the right leafy buds.

The engineers were testing the Lettuce Bot, a machine that can “thin” a field of lettuce in the time it takes about 20 workers to do the job by hand.

The thinner is part of a new generation of machines that target the last frontier of agricultural mechanization – fruits and vegetables destined for the fresh market, not processing, which have thus far resisted mechanization because they’re sensitive to bruising.

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This article was posted: Monday, July 15, 2013 at 10:41 am

Tags: domestic news, food, technology

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DARPA’s government-issued robot goes for a stroll

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