7 Most Deadly Start-ups' Weapon Innovations

It's no secret that warfare has gone high-tech, and with a defense budget hovering near $700 billion, businesses that are able to develop innovative products stand to reap the rewards of lucrative military contracts. Here's a look at six real recent inventions built by private companies, start-up contractors, and the military that are part ingenious, part absurd.

In what the government has dubbed "less lethal," weaponry, Taser, a private company based in Scottsdale, Arizona, has designed what's essentially one big Taser shotgun. The 12-gauge 500-pump action shoots out a Taser at a range 100 feet—the longest distance on the market today. It also "incorporates a uniquely designed twist, rifled barrel that optimizes the performance of the XREP, ensuring that an optimum spin rate is imparted upon the projectile as it exits the barrel to ensure the greatest distance, stabilization, and accuracy possible," according to the company. The shotgun, which was co-designed with gun-maker Mossberg, retails for about $600.

Consider this the new form of Ultimate Frisbee: the "Modular Disc-Wing (Frisbee) Urban Cruise Munition," also called Lethal Frisbee UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles). The U.S. Air Force gave Triton Systems, a Chelsmford, Massachusetts-based company $100,000 to develop the flying discs, which are built to "to locate defiladed combatants in complex urban terrain and provide precision fires to neutralize these hostiles with minimum hazard to friendly forces or bystanders."

Thwart your enemies with…a stink bomb? That's one of the ideas to emerge from the Department of Defense's Non-Lethal Weapons Program. With the help of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, the DoD developed a stink bomb so nauseating it could disperse riots by unleashing an ungodly redolence. Pam Dalton, a Monell researcher, told ABC News that the worst smells "had some screaming in revulsion." So what's in a nearly-lethal stinkbomb? A cocktail of chemicals derived from "burning hair, rotting flesh, and wet human waste."

This surveillance device literalizes the expression of becoming a "fly on the wall:" Real insects implanted with electronic circuitry that can be guided—via GPS—to specific enemy targets by sending electrical impulses to their muscles in order to direct their paths. Equipped with tiny video cameras, they're essentially, surveillance fly-spies. According to the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (a.k.a. DARPA, the secretive subgroup within the Pentagon that designed the robot-bug) "the realization of cyborgs will provide compact platforms that use highly efficient biological systems developed over millions of years of evolution."

First there was pepper spray. Then came the stun gun. And then: The vomit flashlight. Here's how it works: Say you're confronted with a potential enemy. Rather than using lethal or near-lethal force to stop them from approaching, turn on your Dazzler, a flashlight that emits incredibly bright pulses of LED. The bursts of light work immediately, disorienting the would-be assailant and incapacitating them with waves of dizziness and vertigo, according to its creator, Intelligent Optical Systems, a California-based private firm that designs high-tech lasers. The Dazzler was commissioned by the Department of Homeland Security, and sells for about $1 million each.

Foster-Miller, a Waltham, Massachusetts-based firm that specializes in building military robots, put together this not-so-cute little robot: an all-terrain robot touting an M249 machine gun that's controlled remotely. The "special weapons observation remote reconnaissance direct action system," or w can be "lifted by two men" and easily carried in the back of a Humvee, according to the company. Though the military does not release official statistics on how many of these robots have been deployed, they've been used in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Instead of making equipment lighter, what if you made soldiers stronger? That's the idea behind the Human Universal Load Carrier, a hydraulic-powered exoskeleton that gives soldiers the ability to carry additional loads of up to 200 pounds for extended periods of time. The titanium suit, which contains computer sensors that sense the direction its user wants to go—and accelerates motion in that direction—was developed by Ekso Bionics, a robotics start-up founded in Berkeley, California in 2005, and licensed the technology to Lockheed Martin. "Its flexible design allows for deep squats, crawls and upper-body lifting," its makers say. Berkley Bionics is currently at work developing an affordable exoskeleton for wheelchair-bound civilians, helping them walk again.