DARPA Investing $7 Million In Real Life ‘Avatar’ Project For U.S. Soldiers

As I mentioned earlier, real life Avatars are coming to our real world from movie world; might be Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of US took that seriously and they are determined to bring the Avatars in our world. DARPA is investing only $7 Million for this. These Avatars are being built for US soldiers. US soldiers will be able to control these Avatars using just their minds.


The Avatar (Robot) will be inter-connected with the soldiers with advanced telepresence mechanisms. It’s something like you train a dog, it catches the techniques and later it performs as you want. Seems like an educated and rational dog. In order to save and protect US soldiers life and making their tasks easy, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have been allotted only $7 million to invest in so-called ‘Avatar’ project. The purpose of this project is “develop interfaces and algorithms to enable a soldier to effectively partner with a semi-autonomous bi-pedal machine and allow it to act as the soldier’s surrogate.” This real life Avatar is basically a Robot. See the image below which will give you absolute idea of this robot’s working process.

In the movie Avatar, humans were hooked themselves up to brain machine interface pods. This brain machine interface pods helped them to control giant genetically engineered human-alien hybrids. DARPA wants to replace ‘giant genetically engineered human-alien hybrids’ with ‘robots.’For better understand, you can click here. The prime thing of this real life Avatar’s performance depend on Program.

The Avatar Robot will be a surrogate of US soldiers. This ‘surrogation’ mostly depends on telepresence. So, DARPA is looking into ‘key advancements in telepresence and remote operation of a ground system.’ The whole inter-connection will be done definitely Virtually. Now, DARPA is observing the ‘semi-autonomous bi-pedal machine’ technology. Check out the video.


The remote controlled Avatars will be capable of doing everything that a human soldier can. They will be able to perform all the duties like ‘room clearing, sentry control and combat casualty recovery,’ via remote control. The agency has already invested huge money for monkeys to control robots with thought. The fact is, the film Avatar cost over $230 million. But this is only a $7 million project. By calculations of money, it’s impossible to get the same technology, telepresence and synchronization as in movie.

But, we must not forget, this is DARPA. I’m sure, DARPA will not let their invested money to be wasted. What do you say, Guys?

Source :Wired, Spectrum
Image Credit : 20th Century Fox
Thanks To : TheVerge

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Anatol

Anatol Rahman is the Editor at TheTechJournal. He loves complicated machineries, and crazy about robot and space. He likes cycling. Before joining TheTechJournal team, he worked in the telemarketing industry. You can catch him on Google+.

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