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If "Ripsaw Tank - Light weight tank that can travel over 60mph and go over obstacles" is not shown property. Visit the source link above.
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Ripsaw Tank Delivers
Death at 60MPH |
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Mean
Machine: Troops could use the Ripsaw as an advance
scout, sending it a mile or two ahead of a convoy, and use its
cameras and new sensor technology to sniff out roadside bombs or
ambushes |
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See the Ripsaw in action: An
unmanned beast that cruises over any terrain at speeds that leave
an M1A Abrams in the dust |
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Cue up the Ripsaw’s greatest hits on YouTube, and
you can watch the unmanned tank tear across muddy fields at 60 mph,
jump 50 feet, and crush birch trees. But right now, as its remote
driver inches it back and forth for a photo shoot, it’s like
watching Babe Ruth forced to bunt with the bases loaded. The
Ripsaw, lurching and belching black puffs of smoke, somehow seems
restless. |
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Like their creation, identical twins Geoff and
Mike Howe, 34, don’t like to sit still for long. At age seven, they
built a log cabin. Ten years later, they converted a school bus
into a drivable, transforming stage for their heavy-metal band, Two
Much Trouble. In 2000 they couldn’t agree on their next project:
Geoff favored a jet-turbine-powered off-road truck; Mike, the
world’s fastest tracked vehicle. "That weekend, Mike calls me down
to his garage," Geoff says. "He’s already got the suspension built
for the Ripsaw. So we went with that." |
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Every engineer they consulted said they couldn’t
best the 42mph top speed of an M1A Abrams, the most powerful tank
in the world. Other tanks are built to protect the people inside,
with frames made of heavy armored-steel plates. Designed for rugged
unmanned missions, the Ripsaw just needed to go fast, so the
brothers started trimming weight. First they built a frame of
welded steel tubes, like the ones used by Nascar, that provides 50
percent more strength at half the weight. |
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Ripsaw:
How It Works: To glide over rough terrain
at top speed, the Ripsaw has shock absorbers that provide 14 inches
of travel. But when the suspension compresses, it creates slack
that could cause a track to come off, potentially flipping the
vehicle. So the inventors devised a spring-loaded wheel at the
front that extends to keep the tracks taut. The Ripsaw has never
thrown a track Bland
Designs |
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Behind the
Wheel: The Ripsaw’s six cameras send live,
360-degree video to a control room, where program manager
Will McMaster steers the tank |
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When you reinvent
the tank, finding ready-made parts is no easy task, and a tread
light enough to spin at 60 mph and strong enough to hold
together at that speed didn’t exist. So the Howes hand-shaped steel
cleats and redesigned the mechanism for connecting them in a track.
(Because the patent for the mechanism, one of eight on Ripsaw
components, is still pending, they will reveal only that they
didn’t use the typical pin-and-bushing system of connecting
treads.) The two-pound cleats weigh about 90 percent less than
similarly scaled tank cleats. With the combined weight savings, the
Ripsaw’s 650-horsepower V8 engine cranks out nine times as much
horsepower per pound as an M1A Abrams. |
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While working their
day jobs — Mike as a financial adviser, Geoff as a foreman at a
utilities plant — the self-taught engineers hauled the Ripsaw
prototype from their workshop in Maine to the 2005 Washington Auto
Show, where they showed it to army officials interested in
developing weaponized unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). That led to
a demonstration for Maine Senator Susan Collins, who helped the
Howes secure $1.25 million from the Department of Defense.
The brothers
founded Howe and Howe Technologies in 2006 and set to work
upgrading various Ripsaw systems, including a differential drive
train that automatically doles out the right amount of power to
each track for turns. The following year they handed it over to the
Army’s Armament Research Development and Engineering Center
(ARDEC), which paired it with a remote-control M240 machine gun and
put the entire system through months of strenuous tests. "What
really set it apart from other UGVs was its speed," says Bhavanjot
Singh, the ARDEC project manager overseeing the Ripsaw’s
development. Other UGVs top out at around 20 mph, but the Ripsaw
can keep up with a pack of Humvees. |
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Over the
Hill: Despite the best efforts of inventors
Mike [left] and Geoff Howe, the Ripsaw has proven
unbreakable. It did once break a suspension mount — and drove
on for hours without trouble |
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Back on the field,
the tank has been readied for the photo. The program manager for
Howe and Howe Technologies, Will McMaster, who is sitting at the
Ripsaw’s controls around the corner and roughly a football field
away, drives it straight over a three-foot-tall concrete wall. The
brothers think that when the $760,000 Ripsaw is ready for mass
production this summer, feats like this will give them a lead over
other companies vying for a military UGV contract. "Every other UGV
is small and uses [artificial intelligence] to avoid obstacles,"
Mike says. "The Ripsaw doesn’t have to avoid obstacles; it drives
over them." |
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