By Chris Scott Barr

There are some debates that all geeks seem to have with their friends. Star Wars vs Star Trek, Pirates vs Ninjas, Windows vs Mac, etc. One that tends to come up in my circle is which will try to take over the world first, zombies or robots. Well here’s a little bit of info that’ll give you an edge when voting on the side of robots.

Apparently a group of people have developed a sniper robot that refuels using biomass. Yes Virginia, the damn thing gets its juice from consuming human bodies. I’m sure that it’s programmed to only go after dead bodies, but a quick bullet to your backside would be enough to prevent its imminent shutdown. The AI is programmed to plan out its actions for the immediate future through the next 24 hours. With a name like EATR, what could possibly go wrong?

[ RTI ] VIA [ CrunchGear ]

This is pretty old but I thought I’d put it out there in light of recent movements by our future robotic overlords to become autonomous. The Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR) by RTI has a built-in foraging system that can harvest biomass as well as fuel like gasoline, propane, coal, and solar energy on the go. It powers itself with a combustion engine and can hunt out and ingest these foodstuffs automatically.

The fact that these things will get buzzsaw arms is slightly disconcerting but expected. While most of the human quarry will already be caged by the time EATR comes to power, there may be some folks who have run off the reservation and need to be brought back, honeybee-style, on the rear legs of an EATR STRIDR. Damn, 2012 is going to suck.