Vacuum Advance Unit

Army tests weapons systems geared to the 20-something video gamer

Caucasian Sands Missile Range, N.M. -- Inside a travesty village on the southwest edge of the 3,200-square-mile Immaculate Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, the Army tests war systems that can trace their origins to the Roomba vacuum cleaner and the X-Box video match.

Spec. Ronald Wagle is a 23-year-old video gamer turned grunt with Cast C in the 2nd Combined Army Battalion of the Army Evaluation Chore Force. The handheld gizmo he uses to control a mechanical man "is almost exactly the same as an X-box controller," he said.

Wagle uses the controller to deftly dodge the robot, whose camera-equipped head gives it more than a feverishness resemblance to the R2-D2 robot in Star Wars , to check buildings in the village for weapons, including globe-trot wires that could set off an improvised explosive device.

Source: Nextgov

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