

Jon Anderson has seen a lot of gawkers pause at his Northrop Grumman booth in the Association of the U.S. Army's Washington conference. Not that he's odd-looking or off-putting: He's a gregarious guy. The stares he's getting are about the .50-caliber M2 machine gun he's got mounted on a treaded robot – something Northrop isn't even selling right now.

"Quite frankly," explains Anderson, a Northrop advanced-systems employee with short white hair and a whiter smile, "a weapon on a robot brings people into the booth."

That it does. For the past few years, Northrop has produced a treaded, 60-inch robot vehicle to help troops haul their gear called the Carry-all Mechanized Equipment Landrover, or CaMEL. It's like a more traditional version of the BigDog robot – a simple flat, motorized platform that putters along at up to 7 miles per hour while taking on up to 1,200 pounds of stuff. Northrop has sold more than 60 of them to the Israeli military; and recently, the Army's Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning expressed interest in the CaMEL as a hauler.

Only the version of the CaMEL Anderson brought to the conference doesn't have any room to load on any gear. There's a machine gun where the boxes and the body armor should be, with wires stretching from the gun down into the guts of the robot.

With a grin, Anderson calls it a "new application," comparing his modification to the first time someone thought to arm a drone with a Hellfire missile. "We're gonna come around the side here," he says, "and scare people half to death."

That's because Anderson has a touchscreen control, mounted in a nearby mockup Humvee, that jerks the gun around, lifting the nozzle skyward, dropping it back down and pitching it 90 degrees around. Passers-by pause their conversations at the sound of the whir of the gears that send the business end of the gun in their direction. Eyes get a little wider. Walking gets a little faster. In case it needs to be said, the gun isn't armed.

But the firing of the gun is all done remotely – through the same touchscreen controls that Anderson would normally use to send the CaMEL marching along. This version is actually stationary, even though Anderson expresses pride in its hybrid engine. ("It works just like a Toyota Prius," he says.)

It's just a suggestion for the Army, Anderson says. Fort Benning is interested in a cargo-carrying robot, not a weaponized model: "The Army has not bought this." That's an understatement. The Army sent an armed robot called SWORDS to Iraq in 2007 – with great fanfare. But the Army wasn't comfortable sending the machine-gun equipped 'bot out on combat missions for fear of it malfunctioning. There are no plans for replacements.

All Anderson is doing, he says, is nudging the Army, suggesting that maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing to have a rolling armed robot, and rattles off all the guns it can support: the M240, the M249, the MK19 grenade launcher, a 25mm or 30mm cannon. What could go wrong?

Photo: Spencer Ackerman

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