The Army will begin equipping combat units next year with remote-controlled robotic vehicles designed to carry ammunition, water and other heavy combat necessities for soldiers, if officials at Fort Benning, Georgia, get their way. The Army has been experimenting with the concept of robotic mules for more than a decade. But the performance of four competing prototypes of a Small Multipurpose Equipment Transport (SMET) during a recent operational test demonstration with units from the 10th Mountain and 101st Airborne divisions has made believers out of officials from Benning's Maneuver Capabilities Development and Integration Directorate (MCDID). "The operational test demonstration really showed that the capability is ready," Col. Tom Nelson, director for Robotics Requirements Division at MCDID, told reporters Tuesday. The SMET is capable of hauling 1,000 pounds of soldier gear for 60 miles within 72 hours, and will also generate three kilowatts of power to charge the growing number of tactical electronic devices soldiers carry, according to officials at MCDID, the organization that has the lead for developing and testing robotics and autonomous systems designed for Army brigade combat teams (BCTs).

While videos of giant robots welding vehicles are exciting to watch (sparks!), humans are an important part of the assembly of vehicles. However, as you would expect, doing the same thing over and over often leads to injuries. For workers reaching up all day, that motion can be especially hard on their shoulders. To help, Ford will be offering exoskeleton vests to folks in 15 assembly plants around the world. The EksoVests (built by Ekso Bionics) are available for employees that have to reach overhead multiple times a day.

The U.S. Army launched a revolutionary SMET initiative that aims to integrate robots into brigades. While top brass walked the floors of AUSA exploring innovation for future combat in Washington D.C., in Georgia at Fort Benning, robot selection to join the troops is in an intense final week. Many companies had thrown their robots in the ring for selection to serve and the Army narrowed down those invited to the Benning phase that began back on Sept. 11 and is expected to conclude Oct. 14. The final four robots will be chosen and the Army will ask the companies to begin production. The jungle drums at AUSA have it that the selected robots may be integrating and working alongside soldiers in brigade combat teams (BCTs) as soon as early next year.

Thomson-CSF, Corporate Research Laboratory Domaine de Corbeville 91404 Orsay, France The problem of assessing the value of a candidate is viewed here as a multiple combination problem. On the one hand a candidate can be evaluated according to different criteria, and on the other hand several experts are supposed to assess the value of candidates according to each criterion. Criteria are not equally important, experts are not equally competent or reliable. Moreover levels of satisfaction of criteria, or levels of confidence are only assumed to take their values in linearly ordered scales, whose nature is often qualitative. The problem is discussed within two frameworks, the transferable belief model and the qualitative possibility theory. They respectively offer a quantitative and a qualitative setting for handling the problem, providing thus a way to compare the nature of the underlying assumptions.