Americans attached a flamethrower to a robot dog and put it on the market: here’s how much it costs and what it pays | Business

Not a single company in the world is currently developing four-legged robots – the American Boston Dynamics continues to improve its Spot, and the researchers of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, using artificial intelligence (AI), taught the four-legged, dog-like robot “ANYmal” to overcome a parkour course of up to 8 km /hour speed.

They are often informally referred to as robot dogs, mainly due to their size, movements and appearance.

American company Throwflame recently added to the robot-dog concept what they thought was always missing: a flamethrower.

This product is already commercially available. Throwflame announces that their Thermonator product, “the first robot dog with a flamethrower in history” will cost 9.42 thousand. US dollars (about 8.6 thousand euros).

The Thermonator is a four-legged robot with an ARC flamethrower attached to its back. Its battery lasts for one hour, the flamethrower has a range of 30 feet (about 10 meters) for one hour, and it supports Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity. This allows it to be controlled remotely via smartphone, he writes arstechnica.com.

The video shows that this robot moves quite smoothly and can blow flames even while jumping:

It also includes a LIDAR sensor for mapping and obstacle avoidance, laser measurement and first-person navigation (FPV) via an onboard camera.

The Thermonator is based on the Unitree Go2 version of the quadruped robot, which costs $1,600 in its basic configuration. arstechnica.com. This product weighs almost 17 kilograms.

The company names the following possible areas of application of the new robot: “fire control and prevention”, “agricultural management”, “ecological protection”, “snow and ice removal”, “entertainment”.

Despite the fact that such a robot looks very dangerous, it is announced that it is legal in 48 of the 50 states of the United States, writes arstechnica.com.