Australia Hosts Military-Robot Competition
July 14th, 2009
The TV show of terrorizing, bolt hungry robots, Robot Wars, would be a good example of a U.S. Autonomous Robot Competition, but the Australians have decided that it’s better to disarm the robots and only make them patrol. The U.S. have put in over 2.5 million dollars into this project while the Australian Defence Department is said to be putting in more than $500,000. Even though the U.S. is paying more, The MAJIC or Multi-Autonomous Ground-robotic International Challenge will take place in Australia on a date in November, 2010.
Now about the Competition. “What we would expect is that the robots would identify a target and watch a target for a set period of time and … that would be counted as target-neutralised” Says Australian Minister for Defence Personnel, Material and Science Greg Combet. So the whole competition is to find the best robots that can patrol, target, watch, and then communicate the information to other robots around the area.
What the U.S. and Australian Defence Department wish to accomplish are new autonomous robots willing to work as said above. Five short-listed competitors will receive research grants of $100,000 while the top three finalists will receive an extra 1st-$750,000, 2nd-$250,000 or 3rd-$100,000. That’s a pretty good sum of money to fund your non-killing machines.
