A machine built for mud has no business in the ocean.<\/p>\n
Wheels are the wrong shape for water, a hull full of batteries is the wrong thing to submerge, and the entire design problem of a land vehicle is traction against something solid.<\/p>\n
On a Portuguese beach last September, one of them came out of the surf anyway.<\/p>\n
Seawater draining from eight wheel wells, sand packing into the tread, a folded mast<\/strong> lying back along the roof.<\/p>\n Nobody carried it up the sand.<\/p>\n It had been lifted off a warship by crane, dropped into open water, and it made the beach under its own power<\/strong> with a strapped buoyancy module<\/strong> on each flank.<\/p>\n The vehicle floats because its hull is sealed and displaces more than it weighs.<\/p>\n That is the easy half. The hard half is that nothing on it was built to push water, so the only thing available to push with is the wheels themselves.<\/p>\n Eight low pressure tires turning under the surface behave like very poor paddles<\/strong>.<\/p>\n They grab a little water on the way down and slip most of it, which is why the whole platform tops out around three miles<\/strong> an hour afloat.<\/p>\n Spinning them harder does not help.<\/p>\n Past a certain point the extra rotation just churns the water into froth and turbulence<\/strong>, so the machine burns more current without moving any faster toward the sand.<\/p>\n Strip the mission gear off and it is a squat electric truck about ten feet long.<\/p>\n Eight driven wheels, roughly nine inches<\/strong> of clearance underneath, a battery drivetrain with no engine noise and almost no heat signature to find.<\/p>\n On dry ground it is not fast.<\/p>\n Something like 19 miles<\/strong> an hour flat out, or about eight hours<\/strong> of running if the operator keeps it down to a walking jog.<\/p>\n The load figure is the one that matters.<\/p>\n It will carry 1,320 pounds across country, which is a useful amount of ammunition, water or a stretcher case, and that is before anybody puts it in the sea.<\/p>\n Troia is a long sandy spit south of Lisbon, with the Atlantic on one side and an estuary on the other.<\/p>\n The Portuguese Navy runs an operational experimentation center there, and every September it fills with robots.<\/p>\n Two exercises overlap on that beach.<\/p>\n One is run by the Portuguese Navy and reported 276 uncrewed<\/strong> systems this time. The other is run by the alliance maritime command and counted 2,000 participants<\/strong> from 22 member states.<\/p>\n The observer list is its own map.<\/p>\n Thirteen non member countries sent people to watch, from Brazil and Chile to Pakistan, South Korea and New Zealand<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The beach run was not the demonstration. It was the delivery.<\/p>\n Bolted to the deck was a sensor mast of the maker’s own design, a French tethered drone that flies on a cable, and an American radar built for spotting small slow objects<\/strong>.<\/p>\n One more item rode along.<\/p>\n A loitering munition<\/a>, the kind that circles an area and dives on what it finds, which a supplier said was set up ready<\/strong> to launch within two minutes of the coordinates arriving.<\/p>\n That is the sentence worth sitting with.<\/p>\n An unmanned vehicle can now put itself on a hostile shore and have a strike weapon<\/strong> airborne before the people who own that shore know a boat came near it.<\/p>\n Machines have been doing quieter versions of this work in salt water for years, inspecting underwater components<\/a> nobody wants to dive to.<\/p>\n The payload halves the moment it swims.<\/p>\n In the water the rated load drops to 660 pounds<\/strong>, so the vehicle that could haul a stretcher and its gear across a field arrives on the beach carrying roughly half of it.<\/p>\n Then there is the word autonomous.<\/p>\n The official tally<\/a> of the exercise says nothing about who was steering during that crossing, and neither does the maker.<\/p>\n The kit supports full self driving<\/strong>, following and convoy modes, but no published account states which one was running in the surf.<\/p>\n Salt is the other silence.<\/p>\n Nothing has been released about how the seals, bearings and battery pack hold up after repeated immersion<\/strong>, and that is the number an army would actually buy on.<\/p>\n Other people are solving the swimming part differently, with a small machine that swims on flippers<\/a> rather than dragging wheels through the water.<\/p>\n The beach at Troia will fill up again next September.<\/p>\n Until then the honest summary of this ground robot is that it can reach a shore at walking pace with half a load, which is either not very much or exactly enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A machine built for mud has no business in the ocean. Wheels are the wrong shape for water, a hull full of batteries is the wrong thing to submerge, and the entire design problem of a land vehicle is traction against something solid. On a Portuguese beach last September, one of them came out of … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":35178,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_focus_keyword":"2 425 pounds","rank_math_title":"A 2,425 pound military ground robot was craned off a warship into the Atlantic and paddled ashore on its own eight tires, at a top water speed of about three miles an hour","rank_math_description":"A Canadian-built ground robot was dropped from a warship off Portugal and navigated back to the beach alone, the first time it had done that abroad among","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35171\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Why the tires are the propeller<\/h2>\n
What the thing actually is<\/h2>\n
The stretch of coast where this happened<\/h2>\n
What it was carrying when it landed<\/h2>\n
What the trial does not tell you<\/h2>\n