An infantry of robots fighting in the battlefield may soon be a reality, US scientists have said, and more importantly, they might even be empowered to take their own decisions!
Bob Quinn, general manager at Foster-Miller of Waltham, Massachusetts, whose machine-gun-equipped robot, Sword, was certified safe for use by the US forces in June, has said that robot infantry may soon became a reality, however, adding that the exact time of their deployment is something still in doubt.
"Sometime in the coming months, chances are that we will be seeing TV reports that an armed remote-controlled robot has been used in anger for the first time. I can't talk about when that may be," New Scientist quoted Quinn as saying.
He said robots had already proved their mettle in defensive roles in several battlefields in Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel. Even in the UK, they have been used to safely detonate improvised bombs, he added.
Forster Miller's Talon robot and Massachusetts based iRobot's PackBot are the two lightweight robots that are being presently being used for performing these defensive tasks. The 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.
Now researchers are developing new versions of these robots to put them in offensive roles, said Joe Dyer, head of iRobot's military division.
"Now versions of these robots are being developed that will allow troops to maneuver and fire a variety of weapons. iRobot has built a prototype equipped with a 20-round shotgun. It will be able to fire over four dozen different kinds of shotgun ammunition, everything from large slugs that would kill an elephant, to buckshot that would cover a wide area," Dyer said.
Quinn said Foster-Miller's Sword was a variant of Talon, in which a rotating machinegun carrier has replaced the manipulator arm. "It's for urban combat and perimeter security and it's fully controlled by the soldier," he added.
However, both robots involve human control some way or the other. Apart from a planned autonomous 'return home' function, neither Sword nor the iRobot prototype operates autonomously.
Researchers nevertheless believe that more complex machines may soon be on the drawing board, and military robots might one day even be asked to make some important decisions on their own.
"The Pentagon's Office of Naval Research (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," said Kirsten Dautenhahn, an AI expert at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK.
"It is a prospect that is causing some concern. It is ethically problematic to use software that may work in lab conditions but not under a whole range of extreme conditions, such as when you suspect someone might be a suicide bomber," he added.
