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Robots for No Man's Land
Roland Piquepaille writes "The Stryker is an 18-ton infantry vehicle, already deployed by the U.S. army in places such as Iraq. Right now, it has human drivers. But that will no longer be the case by 2010, when it will be driven by a robot. Today, the Stryker has a 'ladar' scanner, which emits 400,000 laser and radar beams and snaps 120 images every second. 'Its brain -- a 40-pound computer system tucked inside its body -- processes that data, and makes instant judgments on how to act and where to go.' These robots are developed by General Dynamics Robotic Systems, Inc. (GDRSI), which received $185 million last November to build between 30 and 60 automated-navigation prototypes to be used in all kinds of military vehicles. This overview contains more details, references and photographs."
There is no danger of these 18 ton robotic war machines going berserk and killing everyone around them. None at all. Really. You should all feel secure in the knowledge that they were programmed by the lowest bidder.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
Lets say the US has a fully automated robotic army. Ignorning the whole "SkyNet" issue, does this mean making war is now a no brainer? Because if American's don't have to die, do we just beat up whoever we want whenever we want? I for one think that this will change the world more than the Atom bomb did.
Ok, so they can build multi-purpose, multi-terrain robots that have to make life or death decisions with automatic weapons, but they can't make a couple to send up on an unmanned probe to fix the hubble? There's something wrong with the math here...
Whee signature.
From the article: "Developing a robot is like raising children, researchers say. "
Hide when they reach puberty
Wouldn't it make more sense to use radio control by human operators, rather than autonomous on-board robots? Can the on-board robot really deal with every possible circumstance? Does it have enough "judgment" to improvise? Isn't human control simpler and hence more robust?
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
But people do die in these actions - perhaps not americans, but lots and lots and lots of people die in a variety of horrible ways. Make no mistake about that.
as much as this might be just a random quote... it could very well be reality in a coming years. I think eventually will wind up following the path of nuclear weaponry. With no human deaths it would be more an economic case of who could support such a battle; possibility turning war into a rather large costly game of chess. Only once the robotic defenses were broken could anything be achieved.
Then again, what else is new, thats what we've been doing with people for years... who ever can send bigger better forces wins.
You would think eventually people could reason out better ways to deal with conflicts than war... that money could be going to a myriad of other things, but no we're making smart tanks (granted the technology could be useful, i just dont agree with the purpous)
but it will happen and an interesting danger arises with this revolution in military tech.
Currently, governments and militaries are limited by what they can do because they need citizens to power the military machine.
Once you remove the need for large quantities of citizens two problems arise:
1. Robots will have no problems killing ANYBODY that it's controller tells it to. In the US at least, millitary coup is improbable because soldiers == citizens and would probably not attack the general population if ordered to do so. Robots don't have families and ethics.
2. Wars are currently limited by public opition. When our sons and daughters are no longer dying, the public will have much less to worry about when attacking somebody. With robots , we (the US) may have already started fighting with Syria, Libia, Iran...
From the Washington Post article here which is btw the article which is actually referenced in the article that's posted above,
:(.
Sad Sad :(
An unmanned Stryker is part of the military's effort to move more machines into battle to save both money and lives. "Well before the end of the century, there will be no people on the battlefield," said Robert Finkelstein, a professor at the University of Maryland's School of Management and Technology.
The sad part is of course that he didn't say: "Well before the end of the century, there will no longer be a need for battlefields"
But whey would you replace the driver of a PERSONNEL carrier???
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
The real problem with imaging LIDAR devices is that you can't make any money building them. Five companies have exited the field in the last decade. There are commercial markets for single-point rangefinders, and for line scanners, but true 3D devices to date have almost all been one-offs.
Most of the existing 3D devices contain rotating machinery. Some have two moving mirrors. This results in a bulky unit, because you need an inch or two of light-collecting aperture on the receive side, implying big moving mirrors inside. The General Dynamics Robotics prototype was a small linear array of laser rangerfinders fronted by a rotating prism, which got them down to one moving part. But it was still a big unit. The mechanisms used to date look too much like the ones used for mechanically scanned television in the 1930s. That's a dead end.
Flash LIDAR devices exist, but have a basic problem. They must illuminate the whole field of vision, so the optical power requirement goes up as the fourth power of the range. (For point beams, it's only the square of the range.) So either they only work at night, like the Sea Lynx, they have very limited range, like the one from EFPL Zurich with a seven-meter limit, or they are not eye-safe, like the next-generation air-to-air missile seeker head currently in development for the USAF.
Despite this, we'll probably see a good solution in the next few years. It will take custom IC development. Then we'll have true 3D cameras.