I know this sounds like a silly question, especially it you’re like me and a fan of the Steampunk and Neo-Victorian aesthetics. I’m a huge fan of the old Arcanum PC game, would be a fan of Unhallowed Metropolis game if I were the kind of person to be a fan of roleplaying live action or not and have often idly pondered having my own Steam Powered Corpse Eating Killbot for personal use, but now that RTI has actually developed a real life version, called EATR, I find myself grasping my pistol under my frock coat in fear:
 It could be a combination of 19th-century mechanics, 21st-century technology — and a 20th-century horror movie.
A Maryland company under contract to the Pentagon is working on a steam-powered robot that would fuel itself by gobbling up whatever organic material it can find — grass, wood, old furniture, even dead bodies.
Robotic Technology Inc.’s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot — that’s right, “EATR” — “can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable,” reads the company’s Web site.
That “biomass” and “other organically-based energy sources” wouldn’t necessarily be limited to plant material — animal and human corpses contain plenty of energy, and they’d be plentiful in a war zone.
[…]
The advantages to the military are that the robot would be extremely flexible in fuel sources and could roam on its own for months, even years, without having to be refueled or serviced.
Upon the EATR platform, the Pentagon could build all sorts of things — a transport, an ambulance, a communications center, even a mobile gunship.
In press materials, Robotic Technology presents EATR as an essentially benign artificial creature that fills its belly through “foraging,” despite the obvious military purpose.
That “foraging” would include looking for (hopefully) dead humans to “eat” to power its fancy steam engine. But what are we envisioning here? An autonomous military robot that can operate independently indefinitely as long as it has “biological material” to eat? Forgive me for being confused as to why.
According to RTI’s EATR presentation (.pdf) the robot is designed to autonomously scavange for food sans human command or control, reproducing the behavior of biological entities. Since we biological entities like to kill fresh meat rather than wait for road kill to fall in our laps let’s hope this is just marketing hype. CNET’s Technically Incorrect claims Fox News is overreacting, and seemingly doubts the corpse eating will happen but on page 19 of the presentation RTI claims to be close to achieving “machine cognition” which includes computational equivalents of imagination, true intelligence and awareness. So whether or not EATR robots decide on long pig for dinner might literally be up to the machine.
National Geographic wrote about a bug eating robot in 2006, so the corpse as fuel concept is not new.
But peruse RTI’s material for yourself and tell me exactly why we need this? Supposedly we can use EATR for the long term occupation of territory since the robots can be dropped anywhere and remain operational indefinitely, but why would we want robots that do nothing but spit out bullets and eat anything biological to occupy anything? The purpose of occupation is to control territory, but EATR is basically a Steampunk locust plague. Drop a few of these robots into an area and what will they do? At best exhaust the local food supply, at worst end up on YouTube as anti-American propaganda where cell footage of them sawing apart then “consuming” peasants will simply reinforce our reputations as The Great Satan.
I’m no peacenik but I have the feeling if the EATR team hadn’t gone into robotics they’d be busily trying to find a way to resurrect corpses as part of a plot to end the world in a zombie apocalypse. EATR seems to be little more than a nihilistic anti-human wet dream funded by a defense department well known for being easily distracted by shiny new toys. There is no possible mission where EATR will perform better than our brave fighting men and women, except in the creator’s envisioned survival horror scenario where his machines rampage across the world eating our dead to keep themselves fueled.
Wasn’t there a movie about that?
Update: My buddy Damien reminded me of this link, in which the company claims EATR is strictly a Vegetarian. Which I assume effectively rules out it being able to operate in desert environments?