Cat-food warfare

Army researchers working with robot soldiers have come up with a novel solution for their insurgent-village simulation.

Instead of spending a million bucks on computer virtual-reality environments, they just made a little tiny Iraqi town out of cat-food boxes.

The palm trees are made from pipe cleaners, and the 1/32 scale trucks and cars are just cheap store-bought toys. Plastic toy soldiers represent the U.S. troops allegedly interacting with the killer robots.

Once the cat-food Arab town was constructed, researchers used little cameras to shoot video of all the different streets and squares and angles, which will then be used for training the monstrous death machines.