Armed Robots on the Streets of Iraq
National Defense has a piece about the SWORDS military robots currently in use in Iraq. The SWORDS units are armed, currently with M249 machine guns (although they can be fitted with other gear), but are used primarily for recon.SWORDS, unmanned aerial vehicles, and other such systems are "tele-robotics," in other words, a human is somewhere else controlling the machine. But autonomy, even for armed robots, is coming, he said. That includes a machine that will hunt, identify, authenticate and possibly kill a target without a human in the decision loop.Instead of units with 2,000 soldiers and 150 robots, that equation might be turned around within a decade. "Imagine a detachment of 150 humans and 2,000 robots," Canton said. That won't happen overnight, but the technology is advancing quickly, he said.
Gun-Toting Ground Robots See Action in Iraqi Streets [NationalDefenseMagazine.org via Danger Room]
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Autonomous killbots? Excellent!
Now we can ditch that over-used phrase "collateral damage" and give a new lease of life to "undocumented feature" and "design side effect".
Any volunteers for beta testing?
Personally, I think we're a lot further off than 10 years from a fully automated combat robot.
The problem is in the image recognition, which afaik isn't coming along that quickly. Getting a computer to look at video and tell whether or not the person is carrying a gun and then whether or not they're using it in a hostile manner is a tough one. I'd be interested to hear if some company somewhere was close to solving that problem.
I'm all in favor of remote controlled robots, though. Maybe more like a squad consisting of 1 human and a bunch of robots being remote controlled from a nearby Stryker by the other humans. We should be able to beat terrorists simply by out-spending them. If the ante to do battle gets upped to the billions because you need your own robots to be any good at it, then it will be a lot harder to bankroll terrorists.
Tele-operated units seem much more likely, with some AI-assist perhaps.
I took a stab at building my own wheeled ROV a few years ago with some success.
(It was all about robot wars back then, but I wanted an outdoor-capable rover.)
It's in mothballs presently.
Controlling everything manually is stressful.
But can it play Doom? Oh, wait.
When they showed the SWORDS on Future Weapons I just about made a mess in my underoos. Anyone know of a commercial variant?
Hey, here's an idea. How about a real volunteer army? Kids at home in Littleton using their networked Wii to control units like this in the field.
True autonomy's going to be a loooonnnnggg time in coming, but we can probably handle limited autonomy pretty soon. Even a little UAV like a Raven has the ability to fly on its own given GPS waypoints, though I don't think any are currently cleared to fire weapons without a human's okay.
Autonomous operations on the ground is a much trickier problem given that there are obstacles in the way, but I can definitely see a place for putting the human in a supervisory position -- letting the robot run itself until it gets into a jam or finds something interesting, then signal the operator. The operator then drives the robot around an obstacle or pumps it full of lead.
iRobot (maker of the Roomba) is also working on a version of the Packbot with a shotgun mounted on it that bears a startling resemblance to SWORDS. Note that in the article the shotgun is to be used for "rendering IEDs inert [and] blasting open locked doors," though they go on to say that they'd also be interested in slapping on anything from "automatic weapons all the way up to the Javelin anti-armor missile." Along the same lines but a bit beefier is the MULE, which sports two machine guns and two Javelins.