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"If you don't care about science enough to be interested in it on its own, you shouldn't try to write hard science fiction."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Dope Mule Robot | ||
| A metal sphere that propels itself with a single piston-like foot. |
It's a little delivery robot, with a GPS locator so you can get your stuff delivered anywhere, anytime.
| Then she saw it too. A bouncing machine...
It was crossing the hills with vast, unerring, twenty-meter leaps. A squat metal sphere, painted in ragged patches of dun and olive drab. It had a single thick, pistoning metal leg. The bounding robot whipped that single metal leg around with dreadful unerring precision, like some nightmare one-legged pirate. It whacked its complex metal foot against the earth like a hustler's cue whacking a pool ball, and it bounded off instantly... It was doing a good eighty klicks an hour. As it got closer she saw that its underside was studded with grilled sensors. "It's a dope mule. From my friends in Matamoros... |
| From Heavy Weather,
by Bruce Sterling. Published by Bantam in 1994 Additional resources -
|
You'd better know the code to get inside - sometimes they're booby-trapped.
Alex punched a long string of numbers, with exaggerated care, into a telephone keypad welded into the top of the mule. The robot mulled the matter over, then hissed open on a stainless-steel hinge, showing a big rubber O-ring around its midsection.
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and Technology from Heavy Weather
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and Technology by Bruce Sterling
Tech news articles related to Heavy Weather
Tech news articles related to works by Bruce Sterling
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news articles:
- Prototype Jockey-Ridden Hopping Robot
- Precision Urban Hopper Robot Must 'Stick' Landings
- Precision Urban Hopper Leaps Fence Video
- 'Air Hopper' Robot Grasshopper
| MIT Robot Cheetah Video Shows Gait Transition |
| Drosophila Robotica, The Mechanical Fly |
| Robo-Raven Flapping Wing Robot Bird |
| Bartendro Robot Bartender |
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