"The U.S. Army will soon test a six-wheeled, 20-foot robot to see whether it can traverse rugged terrain, fire machine guns and carry

1,900 pounds of gear without soldiers remotely controlling its every move," Defense News reports.



The two-and-a-half ton Multifunction Utility Logistics and Equipment (MULE) vehicle is seen as the 'bot that will travel with every light infantry company in the Army of ten-to-fifteen years' hence. (Of course, with robots being cut left and right from the Army's future plans, you never can tell.)

"Designed to fly on a Black Hawk, the [MULE] will carry two 7.62mm machine guns and two Javelin anti-tank missiles and feed camera data from its on-board sensors." Backers like Major David Byers, the MULE's assistant program manager, see the machine as "the equivalent of [a] weapon squad. You double the firepower without putting soldiers in harm’s way."

Carnegie Mellon University researchers are working on an even meaner, six-ton version. But making the machine brawny is the easy part, really. The tough thing is making the robot smart enough – and reliable enough – to operate on its own, more or less. Today's military robots on the ground are no more independent than a kid's radio-controlled toy. That's what made the military's robot rally across the Mojave such a big deal: The robots actually drove, and navigated, on their own. The MULE is supposed to pull off the same trick, using "an Autonomous

Navigation System (ANS) whose algorithms can direct its own course."