The U.S. Navy Wants Robot Sailors for Its Aircraft Carriers

Warrior Maven Video Above: Army Infantry to Fight Longer with Research Lab Fuel Cells

​ “To Join Warrior Maven Gold& CyberWar CircleCLICK HERE“

By Michael Peck,The National Interest

There are few places more busy and stressful than the deck of an aircraft carrier.

That’s because a carrier is an airport planted on top of a ship. A U.S. Nimitz-class carrier is longer than three football fields, but that’s a lot less acreage than even a regional airport on land. Still, a carrier has to be to launch, recover and prep jet aircraft, and do so quickly and efficiently. That means swarms of sailors pushing carts laden with bombs and missiles around a crowded floating airfield.Maybe a robot can help?

The U.S. Navy is testing is experimenting with robots that can assist carrier deck crews. The Navy’s Robotics and Intelligent Systems Engineering (RISE) Laboratory is “exploring how it can use robotics to reduce the number of sailors needed for the task of moving supplies around on an aircraft carrier’s deck,” according to a Pentagon news release. “Ultimately, the goal is to have one sailor use a control panel to direct a robot to do the job that a small team of sailors currently does. RISE engineers hope the use of robotics will improve efficiency and safety, as well as optimize sailors’ workloads, freeing them from more monotonous jobs.”

In this Navy video, you can see the little flatbed robots scurrying around a laboratory floor strewn with boxes. At least in the video, they don’t bump into anything.