NEW YORK — Last week was Fleet Week here, so a few of us from Popular Mechanics walked over to Pier 88 on the Hudson River to check out some of the latest gee-whiz weaponry from the Office of Naval Research. I got an in-seat tour of the new Lightweight Stabilized M240 Weapon System, a swiveling rooftop gun mount for Humvees that’s completely computer-controlled from inside the cockpit using dual joysticks and a large resistive touchscreen display.
I used the controls to perform a target lock on an unsuspecting civilian Fleet Week spectator, and as the rooftop turret followed the poor fellow around the area, I remarked to one of the ONR representatives how frighteningly similar the whole system was to a video game. He agreed, then showed me a military spec version of an Xbox 360 gamepad that was an alternate interface for the same machine. (It wasn’t all that different from the one we thumbed to test-drive the Army’s robotic MULE vehicle from Lockheed Martin earlier this year.) Read more…
According to Glenn Derene