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The Future of Battlefield Robots
Alien54 writes "The Pentagon is drafting the Segway two-wheeled scooter as part of a plan to develop battlefield robots that think on their own and communicate with troops. Dean Kamen, the Segway's inventor, says he had no qualms about enlisting his brainchild into the military."
Jonny Five is alive!
I would at least hope for something a bit more speedy/agile. Seems like these things would be overpriced tin cans used for RPG round practice in the field.
I find it particularly amusing that Cartoon Network just had/is having an Iron Giant marathon and this article shows up. :)
I want the army to have battle mechs. Nuff said
Life is not for the lazy.
"Zapp: You see Killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them. Until they reached their limit and shutdown. Kif. Show them the medal I won. [Kif sighs and points to a medal on Zapp's uniform.] Afterwards the Killbots were actually quite friendly. Right Corpse-A-Tron?"
The owls are not what they seem
"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots. Thank you."
Instead of re inventing the wheel, just create a device that you can turn the machines of todays society against the enemy... who needs a segway when you can just have it pitch a pepsi into the head of someone!
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The scene: a dim room in the Pentagon, two generals are sharing a bottle of malt with an admiral.
"Just imagine: a robot army that can think for itself, stand upright, speak clear English..."
"It sounds like a dream, but with those new scooters, it could happen."
"At last, an Army we control..."
"... no more drugs, booze,..."
"... or sleep, even!"
"There's the problem of terrain..."
"Yes, those wheels don't work well in brush."
"Maybe we can make them larger? Like HUGE?"
"Self-balancing tanks? Sounds interesting..."
"... and expensive. I like it."
"... and then we can keep the scooters for backup"
"You mean 'OPERATION NO DISSENT'?"
"Most of our cities are 'wheelchair friendly' already"
"Excellent. And we can just use the tanks in the others."
"Bottle's empty. MAJOR! MORE MALT!"
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How do you explain to a robot the difference between an enemy and a civilian........ In the middle east a shepard has a beard, a turban and a kalashnikov. Enemy troops has a beard, a turban and a kalashnikov. This seems to me to be another pentagon wanking fantasy. (Now for the offtopic rant part....)Then again this has never troubled the US forces. (see. Panama, Sudan, Afganistan, Iraq, Korea, Vietnam). If only they were to spend as much money and effort on peace. With this you even create new customers for you products.
On a second look, it appears that these robots do not, in fact, walk. It might've been helpful to read the article. Or the summary. Or something about what the hell a segway is.
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
So if this project (and others that the US-military is funding), turns out to be succesfull, and allows machines like segway to do most of the tasks humans can do, can we expect them to replace human soldiers? Still I wonder if it wouldn't be bether to equip such machines with more than two wheels... A high center of gravity is good for the robots cameras and sensors, but it also make it easier for enemies to spot it.
No, the humans would be following the robots, carrying spare battery packs and very long cables.
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Ok, we will all concede that losing fewer lives is the goal. However, there is one good part about potential losing lives. It is this, the people of your country (assuming that it is a free country) are not going to tolerate unnecessary loss of life. This keeps most leaders from provoking wars unnecessarily. If the cause is to stop Hitler, people understand that we may take heavy losses, but in the end it is worth is.
If the cause is removing Milosovic from power, people are going to tolerate much fewer losses before they start to demand that we bring our boys home.
Removing this from the battlefield of the future does two things, one it will allow future world leaders to bully less technically advanced countries even more than they do now and two it will increase the amount of terrorism directed at civilians. If I can't kill your people on the battlefield because there are no "people" on the battlefield, I'll do what I have to do to take the war to your "people".
We should proceed with caution.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Dean Kamen mades some useful inventions in his time, but the segway just doesn't seem to meet his list of impressive accolades such as the stair climbing wheelchair and dialysis equipment. Now the military has plans to convert this thing into a militray robot, the idea seems a bit too odd to work. As wonderful as the segway may be for paved sidewalks of the United States, these things are far too slow and bulky to be of much use on the battlefield. Using two large wheels, even with gyroscopic assist, is a bad idea for something that should be as adaptable as a battlefield robot. We realized that wheels were a bad solution to handling varied terrain (hence tanks have treads) a long time ago, why is it suddenly fashionable again? Have the laws of physics suddenly changed? The next step in technology should involve robots with legs (similar to insects for most stable configuration). Though not nearly as efficient as wheels on flat terrain it is quite possibly the most adaptable form of locomotion.
Nuclear war would really set back cable. - Ted Turner
...what's the point of smart robots?
one man , 500 pounds of C4 and a car from blowing you and your checkpoints to smithereens ?
it seems there are 2 wars being fought, the fantasy one where USA is fighting this imaginary foe (like aliens or something) which has a technological superiority beyond all measure and therefore the USA must invent the most sophisticated solutions it can find
and then there is the reality of war which is fighting men who do not wear a uniform with RPG's and donkeys or suicide bombers that look like women or young men and will happily push the button
perhaps if USA went to war with itself it could test all this crap its spewing out of its R&D , iam just suprised that the population doesnt mind pissing money away on these Contractor-gets-rich-at-taxpayers-expense schemes, then again violence is the last bastion of the stupid.
enjoy
As a smart and good man said: "Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding... Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them." It seems we'll have to amend his philosophy that "The pioneers of a warless world are the youth that refuse military service." tho.
As for "The robots would navigate and communicate with each other autonomously, but a human would oversee the whole network.", they'll still get orders from the kind of people who volunteer to join, erm, wait, where's my asbestos suit?
Old joke -
Lt: Are they attacking from the east or the south?
RSHT: Yes.
Lt: Excuse me?
RSHT: Sir, yes sir!
How would they get the infrastructure in place to charge these things in a hot desert setting? Or in the mountains of Afghanistan. I mean, the terrain itself would be impossible to negotiate.
And the problem in both those places is that the enemy is unknown. Every civilian is a potential guerilla.
Seems like a solution, but to the wrong problem.
It appears that war has segregated into several models:
1. Bushwar/guerilla warfare, involving low-tech small arms, often young soldiers, civilians, etc. This is the most common kind of war, the one with the most casualties (think: 3m dead in Congo in the last 5 years, by one estimate), also the one we hear least about. Robots? Big joke.
2. The Empire Strikes Back: hi-tech warfare against regimes or populations that have the wrong opinions, the wrong politics, or just happen to be in the wrong place. Robots? Not needed, it all happens by satellite-controlled smartbombs.
3. Police operations: friendly or unfriendly ground occupation with the goal of creating some kind of stability. Robots? Not likely, this is the most delicate form of aggression.
4. Entertainment: keep the public happy with videos of our heroes wiping out the enemy. Robots? Excellent - fewer of those body bags, and more potential for explosions.
Sigh.
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Eh, and so it begins... we have our Terminators... and they're based on Segways. And you'd think they'd be a bit more intimidating, no?
- A
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
Too hard to click the "Post Anonymously" option when you flame your own posts? Bloody amateurs.
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Segway technology applied to new hi-tech wheelbarrows, shopping carts, toy wagons, wheelchairs, etc.. anything that currently carries weight, needs to remain upright and is manpowered 90% of the time. Segway's gyro-motor controls would make these tools 1000% more useful and convenient.
I can easily see a wheelchair at the price point. Some redundant non-electric safety would need to be implemented.
I can also see a severly dumbed down version used for shopping carts, generic wagons of all sorts... two-wheeled payload carriers. You have a device that's only purpose is to keep itself upright. The cheapest version just does that. A more expensive one would have a motor for forward motion. More expensive would have a proximity monitor and could follow you at an exact distance and have collision detectors to avoid running into things.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Soldier 1: SHOOT! SHOOT! Damn piece of crap!
Robot: *bzzz* *System Slashdotted, rebooting in 35 seconds*
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
Sounds to me like functionoids based on the Segway would be much more useful for keeping down domestic unrest, in clean and uncluttered US cities, than they would in war zones rife with craters, gravel, and corpses.
Geeks need to consider the ramifications of the technology they help to create; otherwise you're selling your own freedoms.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
They say it's Human Transporter, but now we see that it was just a clever ruse all along... its true name is Segway Human Terminator.
geeks are cats who dig a certain kind of cool
Who in their right mind would base a robot soldier on a platform that has to expend energy to STAND STILL. It is one of the principal advantages of a robot that it can stand around idle without burning much power (unlike people).
So now you take away even that. Brilliant.
What's next, soft skin that covers fragile power conduits? How about a CPU that's exposed to the elements? Oh oh, I got it, a robot soldier that can only operate in environments with temperatures between 50 and 105 degrees farenheit.
America seems desperate to introduce all kind of high tech gadgets to make war easier. Yesterday there was a short news story about afghanistan on the BBC. A US post in a contested area was visited by reporters. At night the post comes under attack from rocket fire. The US calls in artilary on where it thinks the rockets have come from. In the morning they go out and check. What they find is missles setup with timers aimed at the post (some had not gone off). So all these highly equipped soldiers plus all the awacs stuff flying up there totally failed to spot a bunch of guys coming in, setting up a few missles and leaving again.
The US took heavy fire (no losses this time or at least not shown) the enemy took ZERO fire. Not one round.
Says it all really.
US army. War is putting a lot of soldiers on the ground with guns and getting them to kill more of the enemy then the enemy kills of you. This has worked for thousand of years. You are not going to be able to chance it. You want to because you don't want another vietnam. Well now you got two vietnams. War is hell but more importantly war only works when it is hell. Only when you totally slaughter the enemy will you convince the enemy to stop fighting. Little clever robots are not going to do this.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
What about using Power Wheels instead of a Segway? Hell, they can hold 130 pounds and move 5 mph. That's a machine gun and plenty of ammo.
Plus, I imagine Fisher Price makes much sturdier equipment than most military contractors anyway.
Phear Children.
The simple answer is they are very expendable and can be made very structurally strong.
.5 of a second after it is attacked to lay a burst at it's attacker.
Now the longer answer: A ruggedized sedgeway (or better yet something that can place itself into a permanently low power stable position, eg 3 wheels or more.) would be able to be very rugged, armoured and would be fairly easy to repair. The same can not be said for soldiers. A armoured trash can, can afford to wait until it is attacked before returning fire safe in the fact it is not important, is highly survivable and will probably manage
Now given the fact that mass production sedgeways cost $5000 odd and after you equip it for military purposes probably $50000. It is still a great deal. In fact I can see 10 000 being purchased at the drop of a hat.
Have two or three trundling along as point teams on patrol. (The bad guys can't let em get too close so they become the targets and that exposes the bad guys.) Set them as forward guards and you can keep the potential bad guys back. Make some that are very menacing (Big, black, with big stubby riot guns, maybe some big speakers, Bright strobes and nasty voices) and they could be very successful crowd controllers as well.
Most of the time in guerilla and urban areas they they sit still (unless patrolling) and so you could have 100's of guards set and flagging themselves for attention if something unusual or out of their ROE takes place. So you get 100 guys sitting in a comfy baracks somewhere, controlling, interdicting or at least observing a large area. Rather than 5 times that number actually being out in the thick of it.
Where they fail is in snatch sweeps where house searches are required but even there they can be used to secure rear areas of the searching troops, establish stop points and to act as covering roles or even anti sniper roles.
Some bigger ones can even act as a pack beast for supplies or maybe even crew served weapons. (Is that 50 kilo's of Machine gun and 1500 rounds of ammo weighing you down, just chuck it on the section trashcan) Having the Command element of a platoon gifted with 4 heavy weapon cans would make most soldiers, a lot happier. The extra firepower and much lessened load will be appreciated.
In more regular combat they are given sweep zones and much more liberal ROE. See enemy, (however defined) shoot it if close, otherwise identify them to command and assist in calling in fire.
Obviously development costs are huge to field basic autonamous combat machines. (somewhat less for command guided or standby and command machines) but once the work is done. A nation can probably afford to buy a fairly large number as supplements to their infantry and other forces. For example even at $50000 a copy a 100 000 would cost 5 billion but allow increased flexibility in the order of 30-50 000 additional on the ground troops. With almost certainly lower ongoing costs, much more rapid return to service if damaged ( A sedeway gets a wheel blown off it can be replaced. The same happen to a man and he's not playing soldier anymore.) and seriously reduced political consequences if one is totalled compared to a man, militaries will love them even if they only act as guards and scouts.
The key tech troubles are the power supply, the logic system, the comms system and possibly security. Loco, navigation, observation and weapon handling is effectively doable right now.
Western sensibilities tell us that there is a difference between a combatant and a civilian. Yet no one has told that to the other side.
During WW2 we didn't really care and perhaps that guilted some people. Eventually with the UN is became the default handcuffs to put on any Western power.
The problem with separating the two is that in the long run the wars are prolonged and so is the suffering. You cannot win a war by just killing the other sides soldiers, they will just make more. To win a war you have to break their will and ability to wage it. People will flee their oppressive regimes if that same cannot protect them from the folly of their actions.
Spending on "peace" as the previous write mentions with his only anti-US rant; forgetting more people died at the hands of other countries - usually within those same countries he listed by their own people; only gets you as far as your enemy wants you too.
In other words, get out of your ignorant dream world. I suppose we should ignore what happens in other countries as long as it doesn't happen here? Well some of them decided to take their little spat to our shores, what are we supposed to do? Just forget about it? Worked well with the USS Cole eh?, the first Trade Center bombing, the barracks bombings in Lebanon and Saudia Arabia?
Summary, it is stupid to spend on peace when the other guy isn't. Its even dumber to pretend that one side is the problem. We live is a violent world in which most of those loonies use the US as an excuse to pummel their own people. Frankly the West has spent too much time sitting on its hands ignoring the problem but the blood is still there. Ignoring slaughter is the same as sponsoring it.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
It's pretty sad that I'm clicking /. links these days just to see how soon the expected over-used joke pops up. This story, battlefield robots, of course would elicit the overlords post.