EATR Robot Runs On Soylent Green
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 2 of February , 2009 at 12:05 am
It’s all very Back To The Future-y, but engine maker Cyclone Power and Robotic Technologies have teamed up to build a robot called EATR, which stands for Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot. When they say “energetically autonomous,” it means that EATR will be able to locate and process available biomass (plants, animals, people) into energy using its own onboard bioreactor.
While it sounds pretty futuristic (and I’m sure it is, in a lot of ways) a bioreactor is basically a fancy steam engine. You burn stuff to produce steam, and the steam drives (in this case) a 6 cylinder radial engine that outputs up to 16 hp or 10 kW. It’s most efficient to use coal or gas or some other high energy density fuel, of course, but you can feed a bioreactor with just about anything that burns. As you can see from the diagram above, EATR is designed with a chainsaw and gripper to decapitate harvest its own fuel when necessary.
EATR is intended for long duration remote missions where conventional refueling may not be easy, such as search and rescue, border patrol, or remote tracking and surveillance. It looks like it’ll have the ability to deploy PackBots (and recharge them, I assume), and it’s built on Lockheed Martin’s existing MULE base. It’s a great concept, I’m just wondering how effective EATR would be as a surveillance or patrol platform… Admittedly, I don’t have much experience with the latest generation of steam engines, but last time I checked they weren’t exactly the stealthiest source of power around.
[ EATR ] VIA [ NetworkWorld ]
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Category: Biorobotics
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