Cruise Missile Navigation - For Robots Like Roomba

quackking writes "Relentless price dropping continues. Samsung patents a system which navigates a robotic vacuum using infrared sensors, map matching. When I worked on this stuff at a gov't spook lab long ago our group budget was in the mid 8 digits. Read all about it here. How hard would it be to repurpose this technology to more sinister uses?"

Comments

Lots of things can be repurposed

[dbrutus]

The entire technological trash heap we idly throw away in the 1st world is fully capable of adding lots of sinister oomph to an Iraq, N. Korea, or other totalitarian regime. The reason it's trash for us isn't because it's no longer useful. It's trash because it takes too many expensive geek hours to get useful work done on it. Drop the price of geeks 99% and all of a sudden the same stuff is quite effective.

In case nobody notices, most totalitarian/authoritarian regimes always seem to drive wages down the toilet so this situation comes up more often than you might think.

So...fire is old technology too....

[tha_mink]

Even fire can be dangerous in the wrong hands.