Re:Boston Dynamics shop: Spot Explorer
by musingsole on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @01:43PM
(#23541877)
Some comments here show the max payload is too low. But I've had the same thoughts, so what does it take to scale Spot to the size/max payload of a horse?
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I guess more importantly, when an AT-AT [0] sized one?
Like BigDog? Not quite horse capacity, but still rideable in terms of load, although I don't know if it would screw up the balance
They had a horse sized payload with the Legged Squad Support system.[1] It worked, but the Marines tried it and it wasn't useful enough. They ended up going with a small ATV for supplies.
(Too noisy, too. A subcontractor was supposed to produce a small, quiet Diesel to power a generator and hydraulic pump, but that never happened. Probably because a small, quiet Diesel is hard. The US military runs on one fuel, JP-8, which works in both aircraft and Diesel engines, so to deploy this, it had to run on JP-8)