DARPA unleashes 20-foot autonomous robo-tank with glowing green eyes

TL;DR: The Pentagon's mad scientists have been cooking up a beast of an unmanned combat vehicle, and it just took a major step forward. DARPA recently put its 12-ton RACER Heavy Platform (RHP) autonomous tank through a fresh round of testing out in the wild.

For those not in the know, DARPA has been working on self-driving military vehicles for two decades now as part of its RACER (Robotic Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resiliency) program. The goal is to develop autonomous ground vehicles that can navigate off-road terrain without any human input.

This newest phase involved letting the RHP loose on some legit US military training grounds in Texas. The video showed off rugged, obstacle-filled environments packed with vegetation, waterways, ditches, and rocky outcrops. Exactly the kind of hellish conditions that could give a self-driving system a full-on meltdown.

But DARPA's 20-foot-long unmanned behemoth seemed to ...