Northrop Grumman’s CaMEL ‘bot features one .50 caliber gun, loads of class

When the dream factory that is Northrop Grumman needed to up the “wow factor” at its Association of the U.S. Army’s Washington conference booth, it did what plenty of CES exhibitors wished they could do: it weaponized. Hence, the deadliest CaMEL yet. The acronym stands for Carry-all Mechanized Equipment Landrover — think of the BigDog robot, but with treads instead of legs. The motorized platform will hump up to 1,200 pounds of gear at seven miles per hour, and as Spencer Ackerman at Wired points out, over sixty of them have been sold to the Israeli military. But the above pictured CaMEL is the only one floating around with armaments: in this case, a .50-caliber M2 machine gun. The gun is fired remotely, via touchscreen controls, and the platform itself could support any number of weapons including the M249, the MK19 grenade launcher, or 30mm cannon. Which kind of proves a pet theory of ours: if you build it, eventually someone will mount a gun on it. Northrop Grumman’s CaMEL ‘bot features one .50 caliber gun, loads of class originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Oct 2010 15:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink

Posted by on October 28, 2010. Filed under News, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry