SKIRMISHER

Sword, Foster-Miller’s machine-gun-equipped robot.

“Robocop” will soon be upon us, and it’s going to be nasty.

The battefield may soon be swarming with remote-controlled machines — and later, autonomous ones — that will quickly demonstrate how a thrilling human endeavor like war could become an arcade game: robots for the rich, bow and arrow/AK-47s for the poor. Guess who wins?

For a glimpse of the “real” future, New Scientist proudly presents:

Robots have already shown their mettle in defensive roles, detonating improvised bombs in the UK, Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan. Foster-Miller’s Talon robot and its rival PackBot, from the Massachusetts-based company iRobot, are the lightweight robots now used for these tasks. These tracked machines, controlled by an operator sitting in an armoured vehicle, are capable of being driven at high speed and use manipulator arms and grippers to place a small explosive charge to disable a suspected bomb.

…

…More complex machines may soon be on the drawing board. A research request issued in August by the Pentagon’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) shows that military robots are one day going to be asked to make some important decisions on their own. The ONR wants to engineer mobile robots to “understand cooperative and uncooperative” people, and inform their operator if they seem a threat. It hopes to do this using artificial intelligence software fed with data from a “remote physiological stress monitoring” system, and by using speech, face and gesture recognition. From this it would draw inferences about the threat that person poses.

via NEW SCIENTIST

Stumble it!