Posted on 07/26/2011 11:40:03 AM PDT by Red Badger
A giant spinning metal rototiller shreds bombs without flinching.
The Digger D-3 is the most recent addition to my own personal list of robots not to stand in front of. It's a mine-clearing robot, and not the sort of mine-clearing robot that pokes around with a metal detector. Instead, it's the sort of mine-clearing robot that just sucks it up and tells the landmines to bring it.
At the front of the D-3 is a giant spinning metal pulverizer-thing-of-death, which has tungsten hammers that beat down almost a foot into the ground, turning everything they touch into mulch. This includes landmines, and although the mines do tend to blow up before getting shredded, the robot hardly seems to notice.
An operator commands this beast from a safe distance using a remote control unit. The hull of the robot is made up of hardened steel plates in a "V" shape to help limit any damage from antitank mines and unexploded shells of sizes up to 3 inches, and the D-3 has been able to successfully ingest mines containing as much as 17.6 pounds of explosive, which is nothing to sneeze at. The only potentially vulnerable spots are the air intakes, which are themselves protected from flying shrapnel by special grates. At full throttle, the D-3 can reliably clear a comforting 100 percent of landmines from the ground at a rate of 10,763 square feet per hour, while also divesting the land of any unwanted shrubbery and unlucky mole colonies.
Despite all the protection, machines do break down on occasion, and Digger has taken the somewhat unusual step of making the robot as easy as possible for other people to repair. The guts of the robot are straightforward to access, the armor has been designed to be easy to weld, and Digger even provides plans so that if you have the means, you can build your own spare parts. The reason for doing this is that Digger wants the D-3 to be able to make a difference in far-flung communities crippled by the threat of landmines, and to do that, you need an extremely reliable robot.
The future for the D-3 likely lies in some form of limited autonomy, but don't worry: The people who actually end up using this thing don't like the idea of it being fully autonomous any more than you do. Expect it to eventually be able to obey pretty specific instructions like "go here," as opposed to commands like "hey, why don't you find a spot where you think there might be landmines, beat it into a pulp, and come back when you're done."
I think that is the idea. Lots of farmland in many parts of the world has been rendered inaccessible by landmines.
Looks like the kind of Roto-tiller they could have used for an episode of “Home Improvement”.
Google “hobart’s funnies” for the “flail tank” mine sweeper and other clever ideas they used in WWII.
Google “hobart’s funnies” for the “flail tank” mine sweeper and other clever ideas they used in WWII.
I doubt they even thought of that when it was designed.
Looks like a Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor creation.
Those who suggest that after use, an area would be good for crops, are not far from the truth.
Maybe not initially, because the explosives in such mines can be quite toxic. But a GM crop could do two things that would turn it into prime farmland. The first is that the crop could both uptake such toxic chemicals, and change color if it does uptake them. The second is that the crop could be like alfalfa, and put nitrogen back into the soil.
Even with the first season, the crop, except for those plants that had changed color, could be fed as nutritional fodder to animals. Then the soil would be ready to produce a high quality food plants the following year.
Probably the best crop for arid Africa is seed amaranth and quinoa, which are very hardy and can produce a large amount of high protein, high amino acid seed, as much as a kilogram per seed head. It was used extensively in ancient times, as a pseudo-grain, but its use was discouraged by Europeans more familiar with wheat and maize.
ping
An interesting treatment for some old war hangovers.
You walk in the cleared path up to it with your tool kit then climb up on the thing & fix it or hook up a tow line to drag it out of the mine field.
I don’t know, but the next time we go to Ft. Hood, I check and see if they have an old one hanging around, doing nothing. Arrowhead will probably know before I do.
Plus it can taste any way you want it too.
I wasn’t trying to be snarky either.
I’d think there has to be, right? That was just the first thing that came to my mind.
I’d like to pick up one of these at a storage locker auction.
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