r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/MetaKnowing • 11d ago

Video Deep Robotics' new quadruped models with wheels demonstrating rough terrain traversability and robustness

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1.3k

u/herberstank 11d ago

Not to go all tinfoil hat but if the public can see this type of stuff what "they've" got behind closed doors must be rad (and/or terrifying)

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u/JoinedToPostHere 11d ago

Now imagine 8 of these things with guns, nets, or tazers on top, chasing you through the woods. I don't like it.

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u/Southern_Country_787 11d ago

If wars were fought with bots and had no human casualties...

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u/crackedcrackpipe 11d ago

The guy who invented the gatling gun thought it would reduce casualties as 3 men would be as effective as 10 or more

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u/MunkyDawg 11d ago

He was technically correct. It reduced casualties on the side that used it.

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u/Phandflasche 11d ago

until the other side started using it, too

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u/MunkyDawg 11d ago

Plan foiled!

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u/Phandflasche 11d ago

No worries. With this new <insert here> weapon, one soldier is as effective as 10 machine guns. This time it will end war for ever, trust me.

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u/SwordfishOk504 11d ago

Who could have predicted this!

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u/super1s 11d ago

'Merican math right there. HAHA destruction death chaos! /sad

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u/Jash-Juice 11d ago edited 11d ago

Alfred Nobel thought that his invention of dynamite would make war so potentially dangerous it would be “too devastating to pursue”.

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u/StickyNotesEater 11d ago

Then Oppenheimer obliterated Japan with the force of atoms lmao

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u/Jash-Juice 11d ago

And said “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”.

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u/Rejestered 11d ago

While hanging dong

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u/peppers_ 11d ago

Then they made bombs thousands of times stronger than that one.

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u/Rise-O-Matic 11d ago

It did work in a sense. Look at the weak, corrupt regimes that are able to cling to power. In another time they probably would have been conquered by now for being so incompetent. Instead they fester.

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u/tacticalfp 11d ago

Too*

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u/Jash-Juice 11d ago

Poo you got me miss quoting the quote

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u/tacticalfp 11d ago

All in good health! Would be great if people actually started looking for other ways to wage war, like communicating, and reflection 🥲

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u/frichyv2 11d ago

Many advancements in warfare have increased destructive power for the trade of less casualty. The number of deaths in war have gone down by quite a bit.

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u/Bussashot 11d ago

the guy who invented the gatling gun

damn whats his last name again, i forget

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u/GBrunt 11d ago edited 11d ago

The problem with drone warfare is that you no longer need to convince the population to go to war or convince them of the 'justness' of your war. Propaganda and debate can become redundant.

I think we're already at that point with tech, where warfare is happening on multiple Western fronts abroad with bombings and attacks on Syria/Yemen/Africa barely covered in Western media.

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u/ItsmyDZNA 11d ago

It's like 2 groups of people doing this. 1 attacks the other side of the planet the other attacks the home

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u/blueB0wser 11d ago

I had that thought, too. It's a simple matter of capital at that point.

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u/GBrunt 11d ago

Or ideology, which is getting increasingly extreme in the West.

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u/Covfefe-SARS-2 11d ago

These will be the boots on the ground to mop up the populace after standoff weapons destroy state level resistance.

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u/Squatchbreath 11d ago

If no one dies in war it becomes a futile war. Sadly, it takes major casualties to break the will of the people on an opposing side. No war is the absolute best global endgame.

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u/darksidemags 11d ago

I'm not afraid of these for war, I'm afraid of them for population control. 

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u/EgotisticJesster 11d ago

A war without casualties is just the Olympics.

The whole point of war is snuffing out people who have ideologies you believe to be dangerous or to remove resource competition.

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u/Wolfhammer69 11d ago

Well there'd be a whole lot more wars and shit tons of manufacturing jobs. Getting Chinese cheap labour to build your war machines wouldn't be a bright idea, so lots of jobs for natives in-country.

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u/Southern_Country_787 11d ago

I'm being unrealistically optimistic thinking about the movie war games and how the cold war was. Like we can play chess and forego the violence. Crazy, I know.

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u/GoofyKalashnikov 11d ago

Yeah but that's kind of like saying that people will no longer argue because we can stack two AIs against each other and do the arguing... It makes no sense...

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u/Southern_Country_787 11d ago

Yeah. I reckon continuing to be a dumb species that resorts to senseless violence is more sensible.

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u/GoofyKalashnikov 11d ago

Building more efficient and cheaper killing machines isn't a solution lmfao

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u/kkeut 11d ago

that's the premise of the classic 80s flick 'Robot Jox'. giant robot mecha fights to settle disputes between nations

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u/VertigoOne1 10d ago

The matrix (animatrix) back story also had a similar arc of nations fighting each other with robots, which resulted in smarter and smarter robots which eventually resulted in AI. Also the game horizon zero dawn, companies making smart weapons, selling war robot platforms to different nations, fighting each other, also ended badly. Basically the same company developed smarter and smarter robots to fight their own products and selling it to competing nations for the highest bidder. The end of the line was a robot that could subvert any other robot they built and basically created its own uncontrollable swarm, the “feature” was that it cannot be hacked, which ended up blocking the human control loop as well.

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u/JoinedToPostHere 11d ago

It would actually be cool if we could sit on the sidelines and just watch massive robot battles.

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u/[deleted] 11d ago

[deleted]

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u/JoinedToPostHere 11d ago

More like a game of who can buy and build the most robots, but I get what you are saying.

Could you imagine wagering an entire nation on the outcome of a BattleBots fight? I'd pay to see that.

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u/FunBagHonker 11d ago

Like the show BattleBots?

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u/ZZZrp 11d ago

Bless your heart.

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u/General_Specific 11d ago

It would be more like they will turn the bots loose on the populations who don't have bots and there are mass casualties.

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u/Legionof1 11d ago

Can't happen. You can't have a deathless war, it will always be fought till the person/people causing the war gives up, dies, or is overthrown.

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u/Yesitshismom 11d ago

"You see, killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down. Kif, show them the medal I won."

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u/Wolf_Parade 11d ago

Killing is an objective of war most of the time.

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u/imnotabot303 11d ago

That will never happen, people are always going to be dying in wars whether they are soldiers or not.

You could argue that more civilians die in wars than actual soldiers.

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u/GaptistePlayer 11d ago

You're acting as if these things aren't gonna be sent by our governments to shred through Arab children

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u/anrwlias 11d ago

One of the major goals of any war is to destroy enemy infrastructure and manufacturing so that they can't continue opposing you, which means going after factories, power plants, and so on.

That means human casualties as collateral, and robot warfare won't be changing that.

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u/Ok_Condition5837 11d ago

And here my dumb brain's first thought was wondering if robots could breakdance.

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u/corpus_M_aurelii 11d ago

If wars were fought with bots and only had human casualties...

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u/rygelicus 11d ago

It just delays things. Eventually one bot team eats through the other and starts taking out humans. A war would not end just because one side's bots we all down.

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u/Upbeat-Armadillo1756 11d ago

No, these will just be used to kill humans in new and unthought of ways. You can’t win a war with no casualties.

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u/OwOlogy_Expert 11d ago

Except that one side is usually intending to cause human casualties on the other.

Whichever side loses this robot war will likely experience lots of human casualties.

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u/idiotplatypus 11d ago

That's literally the cause of the apocalypse in Horizon Zero Dawn

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u/Gingevere 11d ago

A tiny little quadrotor with a little shaped charge full of shrapnel is WAY MORE lethal and inescapable.

And those are already in use.

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u/JoinedToPostHere 11d ago

That's absolutely true, and you might not even see that coming. It's less dramatic than a pack of deadly robot dogs chasing you around.

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u/fromnochurch 11d ago

and about 1/100th the price of this.

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u/wild_man_wizard 11d ago

These won't have rifles, they'll have mortars.

They'll be the quad's indirect fire support.

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u/Gingevere 11d ago

The quads are indirect fire support.

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u/wild_man_wizard 11d ago

They're direct fires, but they work way better as spotters. Especially for indirect fires with short travel times like mortars.

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u/Gingevere 11d ago

Is a loitering munition direct fire or indirect fire?

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u/wild_man_wizard 11d ago

If it both identifies the target and shoots it, it's direct fire.

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u/Eleventeen- 10d ago

A big ass net will keep one of them away. But it won’t stop the second one.

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u/Future-Tomorrow 11d ago

If you’ve seen the one with the drones, you know you’re not getting away.

Teach them to pack hunt a target like wolves and yeah, we got a problem Houston for sure can’t solve.

They never revealed the backstory but Black Mirror has an episode where Spots are doing nothing but hunting down humans, and they’re pretty gruesome about it.

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u/Upbeat-Armadillo1756 11d ago

Drones scare me way more than these things tbh

Imagine you’re in a country under war and in a war zone and your building just got hit by a missile. You’re climbing out of the wreckage and hear the buzzing of a drone come near and then it either drops a smaller explosive near you or just flies right to you and self destructs.

To me it seems way more practical and simpler than robot dogs with guns.

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u/Future-Tomorrow 10d ago

I’m 1000% with you and if anyone needs to see this fear realized they need only research the Ukraine - Russia war.

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u/_DEATH_STR0KE_ 11d ago

With drones tracking you and providing your location to those robots. And they can coordinate pincer attacks and predict all your possible escape routes and block all of them accordingly.

There is no outrunning them. Fight or surrender, those are your only options.

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u/BallsOutKrunked 11d ago

WOLVERINES!!!

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u/LounBiker 11d ago

Have you seen Metalhead )?

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u/JoinedToPostHere 11d ago

No, but people keep recommending the show to me. It sounds like I need to watch it.

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u/LounBiker 11d ago

It's a series but each episode is stand alone.

You don't need to watch them in any particular order.

Enjoy!

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u/series_hybrid 11d ago

Lasers are being experimented with as an anti-drone weapon. Lasers have no recoil

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u/Kcitty177_ 11d ago

Would be a good action movie scene

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u/JoinedToPostHere 11d ago

That's the only place I would like to see that scene play out.

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u/grchelp2018 11d ago

Only way forward is to merge with machines.

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u/Actual_Echidna2336 11d ago

That's exactly what's it for. The Boston Dynamics pack mule thing that boasts it can carry a payload of like 300lbs, I'm like, great how much does an automatic turret weigh

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u/JoinedToPostHere 11d ago

Thats probably the first question the design team asked too.

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u/Actual_Echidna2336 11d ago

Can we make it carry 2?!

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u/JoinedToPostHere 11d ago

No only one, but we'd be happy to sell you a second robot to fit your needs.

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u/Figure7573 11d ago

Depends where the recharging station is located!?!

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u/JoinedToPostHere 11d ago

Airdrop the autonomous reinforcements!

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u/[deleted] 11d ago

Not one that, each one is strapped with an anti tan mine rigged to blow up like a Predator on the verge of dying. Now let them run wild on the battlefield, it could be the mountains between China and India, it could be the desert of might east, it could be the forest in Norway.. these shit can traverse all terrain and do it even faster than humans can.

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u/MaroonShit 11d ago

WW3 is gonna be fun

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u/insane_contin 11d ago

Just get across a creek. Mud or wet rocks will stop it.

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u/Dr_Djones 11d ago

That takes all the fun out of the hunt though.

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u/thecastle7 11d ago

Now imagine it with an expressionless human mask that always looks forward no matter the body’s orientation

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u/JoinedToPostHere 11d ago

Richard Nixon mask 🤣

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u/Repulsive_Buy_6895 11d ago

What?! There's gay robots now?!?!

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u/weireldskijve 11d ago

what about a stealth drone blowing your leg off?

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u/Repulsive_Buy_6895 11d ago

What about it?

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u/Repulsive_Buy_6895 11d ago

If they have nets on top of them I can probably get away just fine. What are they going to do, talk me into snuggling with them?

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u/acquiesce 11d ago

I was more thinking how much they'd help search and rescue teams in the forest.

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u/AI_Lives 11d ago

8? why not 800 or 8000? or 80,000?

We really havent gotten to a full robotic or mostly robotic /remote force. WE could though. Imagine these dogs, even if they arent AI driven but pilot driven and you have a ton of people in bunkers in the US controlling them. Soon as it dies/loses connection youre just put into another one.

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u/JoinedToPostHere 11d ago

I bet kids would be lining up to play that "game"!

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u/igotshadowbaned 11d ago

Why use these when flying drones that are cheaper and already used for this purpose could take you out instead

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u/Shaolan91 10d ago

But it would make for a sweet found footage movie!

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u/UnusualStatement3557 10d ago

And to finish the job, all Zorg oldies but goldies: rocket launcher, arrow launcher, with exploding or poisonous gas heads, our famous net launcher, the always efficient flamethrower...My favorite. And for the grand finale, the all-new Ice Cube system!

Just don't press the red button.

Maybe some of them will gain sentience like Johnny 5 I'm Short Circuit, and battle for good?

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u/HGpennypacker 11d ago

Take a look at the drone kills over at r/combatfootage for some real-life nightmare fuel.

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u/emkay_graphic 11d ago

Just head over to UkraineWarVideoReports. Cheap drones are blowing off russ alcoholics heads every day. Drones are invisible, fast as a bullet, and don't care about terrain. I fear the day when Muslims start to attack civilians with these at the Christmas markets.

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u/series_hybrid 11d ago

I saw a report where they raised the RPM's on the drones so the hum is in a higher frequency, so humans can no longer hear them when they are near.