in the workplace<\/a>. Sankaet Pathak and his startup Foundation Future Industries have a slightly different goal: produce an all-American robot supersoldier.<\/p>\nPathak, Foundation\u2019s CEO, says his company plans to start giving its humanoids lethal capabilities soon, although he declined to share specifics. \u201cWe have some kinetic things we’re exploring,\u201d he tells WIRED. (He means weapons systems.) \u201cWe’ll probably unveil something in the next couple of months,\u201d he adds. Besides combat, the company says its robots could be useful for logistics, reconnaissance, and inspection.<\/p>\n
The US military has a long-standing interest in humanoids. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funded major humanoid contests between 2012 and 2015, and the Army has a program called xTechHumanoids that bankrolls the development of technologies relevant for “militarized humanoid capabilities.\u201d Militaries around the world are rapidly exploring and adopting new autonomous or semiautonomous systems, including aerial drones, small vessels, and compact vehicles. Legged systems can traverse more challenging terrain, and the hope is that humanoids could take on many tasks now done by human soldiers. The war in Ukraine has served as a laboratory for the development and testing of many of these systems; Foundation says it has tested its humanoid, Phantom MK1, with Ukrainian forces.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s unique in its targeting of the military market, and so far it\u2019s been lucrative. The company has government contracts worth millions of dollars and high-profile backers to spread its message: Eric Trump, the president\u2019s son, is both an investor and the company\u2019s chief strategy adviser. \u201cPeople don’t realize he actually is an engineer at heart, so he does a lot of milling and things like that at his home,\u201d Pathak says.<\/p>\n
During an interview with Fox Business on April 23, Trump bragged about the company\u2019s bots. \u201cWhen you go up and you interact with these robots, and they fist-bump you, they high-five you, they follow your commands,\u201d he said. \u201cYou bring in AI autonomy, it’s going to change industry, going to change military application, it’s going to change hospitality. The uses are unlimited, and I think it\u2019s a very beautiful thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Foundation was founded in 2024. A few months later, it acquired a company called Boardwalk Robotics, which worked closely with the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), a nonprofit research institute in Florida known for its work on humanoid robots.<\/p>\n
During Trump\u2019s segment on Fox, the host touted a \u201c$24 million contract with the Pentagon\u201d won by the company, though that appears to be a bit fuzzy: When WIRED asked for more information about Foundation\u2019s contracts, the company shared details of two that had been inherited from Boardwalk and three that came through IHMC. The company doesn\u2019t appear to have independently secured new dough from the government.<\/p>\n
Still, some people believe it\u2019s a promising niche. \u201cIf you put a military hat on, it makes a lot of sense, because it\u2019s where soldiers still die\u2014that first entry through a door,” says one roboticist familiar with Foundation, who asked to remain anonymous so as not to affect business relationships. “If you look at Fallujah, the first Gulf War, you had several thousand insurgents hiding in 10,000 buildings and [US troops] just going door to door.”<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it is so close to feasible that I’m surprised they\u2019re not already fielded,\u201d they add.<\/p>\n
Like other humanoid companies, however, Foundation often portrays its robots performing tasks autonomously\u2014and other experts say fully autonomous robot soldiers are a distant dream at best.<\/p>\n
\u201cRight now, it is difficult to disentangle the current state of the art from the potential of the state of the art\u201d with humanoids, says Robert Griffin, a senior research scientist working on robotics at IHMC who led one project that involved Boardwalk and was a technical adviser to the company. \u201cThere’s a bunch of challenges, spanning the whole gamut of robotics, for the idea of building an actual human soldier,\u201d Griffin says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Some companies want their humanoid robots to fold your clothes. Others want them in the workplace. Sankaet Pathak and his startup Foundation Future Industries have a slightly different goal: produce an all-American robot supersoldier. Pathak, Foundation\u2019s CEO, says his company plans to start giving its humanoids lethal capabilities soon, although he declined to share specifics. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4018,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[83,741,164,165],"class_list":["post-4017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-gadgets","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-military-tech","tag-robotics","tag-robots"],"yoast_head":"\n
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