It's not as exciting as seeing Big Dog or Petman in action, but infantry in the US Army should be happy now that DARPA's begun testing its Warrior Web support system. One day robotic exoskeletons will allow humans to easily lift and carry hundreds of pounds, but for the immediate future DARPA has set its sights on a…

Gone are the days when we could look at cutting-edge robots and at least take some satisfaction in the fact that the human body was still superior. It seems like DARPA is getting closer and closer to outdoing Mother Nature, this time with its ARM-H robot hand that's as impressively dextrous as it is cheap and durable.

DARPA-funded DRS Technologies, Inc has developed a new 1280 x 720 night vision camera with pixels just five microns across—that's reportedly just one-twelfth the size of a human hair. So. Small. The new tech isn't just way more practical, it could save the government a bundle of money, too.

Replacing fighter planes and reconnaissance aircraft with robotic drones turned out to be a far easier task for the military than replacing soldiers with bots. But DARPA remains determined to one day enlist robots for all military jobs, and among other research, it's working hard to develop a relatively low-cost set …

The Fukushima Daiichi meltdown and other recent disasters like Deepwater Horizon highlight a very real need for robotic first responders that can operate in inhospitable environments. In response, DARPA recently issued a Robotics Challenge addressing the issue. Here's the design that Carnegie Mellon University's…

Teamwork is a new concept in the field of robotics, but the idea of creating hundreds of cheap disposable robots that work together to complete a greater task has a lot of promise. So far swarm bots—as they've come to be known—have successfully tackled problems on land and in the air. But now DARPA wants them

Sure, your phone can take a decent picture, but it's not even in the same universe as the best camera the government's got. At 1.8 gigapixels, the DARPA-developed ARGUS-IS the highest resolution surveillance platform in the world, and, when mounted to a drone, can single-handedly do the work of an army of 100…

War dogs. They are equal parts badass and cute. And on top of that, they're smart. They need to be to get the job done. In the interest of finding the cleverest canines for potential war-doggery, DARPA's got a plan to start scanning puppy brains in an MRI machine. But rest assured, those brains are still in the…

There's a bunch of junk orbiting the Earth right now, a bunch of junk that we put there. But not all of the old satellites that are zooming around the planet are totally useless; plenty still have good stuff in them that could be reused and DARPA wants to start mining them.

While UAVs have joined spy satellites as an indispensable part of America's military operations—especially in delivering timely, accurate intel to troops on the ground—they are not the end-all-be-all perfect solution, even in coordination. That's why DARPA plans to supplement these unmanned intelligence gathering…