Sunday, April 17, 2011

LORCS Battlefield Gets Some Street Lights




Well, some of us are getting the itch to get back to work on the RC Tank battlefield. Today, we did some cleaning of of junk. Planned on using some concrete blocks to make some buildings for the city. That way, we don't have to keep picking up and carrying in the buildings once the day's fighting is done.

Finally, Wal-Mart had some real inexpensive solar power yard lights ($1.00 each!). I bought the first six and then later, Ricky purchased aobut 10-12 more and we set them up along the bridge and the main roads in the french town. The pictures to the left here show two daylight snapshots with the solar power light posts set up and in the middle picture, two concrete blocks joined together to form a future building - a store of some kind maybe? The final, nighttime picture shows how effective the lighting is for the battlefield.

The pictures with this post were taken from my new cellphone camera, a Sony Ericsson Xperia. I then email the pictures to myself for eventual use in this blog.

Saturday, April 16, 2011

Ninja Robots by Lockheed Martin. What will they come up next?


I FINALLY have something of interest to post on this blog for April...

You will have to read the full article, but Lockheed Martin is working on some non-flying robots for the military. For jobs such as surveillance or dropping off a payload of some kind.

In the article, this prototype robot looks more like a radio control race car than what the title of the article said (i.e. Ninja). Pictured at left is a image download off of the Internet showing Sony's Robo Pets playing soccer in the RoboCup Japan Open in Osaka, Japan.



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Ref.
1. Christian Science Monitor. "Lockheed Martin developing ninja robots" by Jason Schreier. April 15, 2011. (http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2011/0415/Lockheed-Martin-developing-ninja-robots).
2. Image with article. Sony's pet robots playing soccer in the RoboCup Japan Open in Osaka, Japan. photo by Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP.