Crazy Story of the Day - Upcoming Military Robot Could Feed on Dead Bodies

No your eyes are not deceiving you, a Maryland based company under contract to the Pentagon is currently working on a robot that will be able to consume dead bodies in order to power itself.

The bot, made by Robotic Technology Inc.'s, is called an Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot — that's right, "EATR".

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.

The robot won't only be able to consume dead bodies, which are plentiful in a war zone an full of energy, but it will be able to use any organic compound, such as wood, paper, and plants, to power itself for weeks, even years, at a time without having to be refueled or serviced.

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.

Using the EATR platform, the Pentagon will have the potential build all sorts of things — a transport, an ambulance, a communications center, even a mobile gunship.

Robotic Technology is presenting EATR to the press and public as a benign artificial creature that fills its belly through "foraging," despite the obvious military purpose.

American has this technology already, yet I still hear chants of "Drill, baby. Drill!" ringing in my head. Why is it that the best technology is reserved for the military?

Introduce EATR to the general public and it will be like having a few million compost machines on the road. Not to mention the fact that it is being developed to run for years without service (good-bye quarterly oil changes!).

I can imagine myself throwing all of those worthless phone books that are constantly being delivered to me into an EART car, along with banana peels and last nights leftovers, then taking a nice fuel efficient drive up the coast (after all this thing essentially runs off of steam, that's right - good old H2O).


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