

The crowd gasped last year at the Urban Challenge robot race in Victorville, California, when the 15-ton Oshkosh TerraMax cargo truck – largest by far of the 11 racers – pulled into the gate. The bot had to bow out after minor collision, but its sheer size relative to its SUV-based rivals was most impressive.

Well, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Carnegie Mellon University, whose team placed first at Urban Challenge, is partnering up with tractor-maker Caterpillar to build the world's largest ground robot: a 700-ton robo dump truck capable of hauling 240 tons of earth. Just to be clear: that's nearly 50 TerraMaxes crammed together. (Thanks to Bill Sweetman at Ares for the tip!)

What's the big deal? Well, you can't just scale up robot technology. TerraMax, for its part, required special algorithms in order to navigate in a world scaled for smaller vehicles, according to Oshkosh engineer Chris Yakes. That's the subject of a chapter in my new book WAR BOTS.

And, as always with robots, there's a trust issue – another major theme of WAR BOTS. The bigger a bot is, the more intimidating it is and the less likely people will be to trust it. Consider the reaction Army soldiers had to the Convoy Active Safety Technologies experiment. CAST, a robotic autopilot based on Urban Challenge technology, was installed on a couple medium cargo trucks and put through the paces in Virginia last year. The idea was to give soldiers in Iraq a smart robotic buddy to help them on long supply runs. The robot could steer while the soldier kept an eye out for attackers.

The system was safe, but according to one Army researcher I spoke to, soldiers still didn't trust it.

But with exposure comes acceptance, and as giant bots like Caterpillar's find their niches in the civilian world, the military will become more comfortable with them, too.

(Photo: Caterpillar)

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