Here is part two of the “I procrastinated these blogs until the last minute” Week 15 blog posts. In the last post, I talked about keeping up to date with software development trends, but if you read it, it was a waste of time, and I do humbly apologize for that. To make up for it, I’m going to give myself a redemption arc. After finding that article, I decided to go back to the website where I found the article about deceiving deceivers, which was one of my favorites in my opinion. This time, we get to talk about robots in the military, and if that doesn’t peak your interests, then I really can’t help you, and you can stop reading now.

For those of you that decided to stay however, lets get into this. Supposedly, the military was having an issue with some of their robots. This issue was that they couldn’t get up on their own when they fell. I thought this was hilarious at first, but then I realized that it makes a lot of sense that the robot couldn’t get up on its own, and I now apologize to the creator of these robots. I know it must be hard work, but anything falling is humorous to me. This was a problem until the US Army Research Laboratory and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory got their hands on it. It doesn’t really get much more serious than that. Once Johns Hopkins gets involved its over. On a serious note, however, these scientists started developing a program to ensure that the robot would be able to get itself up, and not have it’s soldier help it. This process is called Self-Righting, and it is crucial that the robots can do this in order to keep a soldier out of harms way. These scientists analyzed any and all predicaments that the robot could ever possibly be in, and using RAPT (software framework for testing autonomous robots) they were able to get the robot to stand back up in any situation. This is a huge breakthrough in my opinion.

This article was a very interesting read, and I highly recommend it to any one pursuing a career in the military or software development or both. I liked this article because the internship that I interviewed for actually was for a software engineering internship for a company that aids the US Military. So, this article was something that I could relate to easily. I can’t argue with the article because I lack the knowledge to do so at the moment. I hope you enjoyed this summary/reaction of the article, and I hope it makes up for the last one.

From the blog CS@Worcester – My Life in Comp Sci by Tyler Rego and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.