Slashdot Mirror
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."
Where have I heard that name before? Stryker, Stryker, Stryker...
Bolo Mk, I, "Horrendous".
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
Yes, but will it fit on a frickin' shark? Is that too much to ask?
How long before it's got an autocannon 10, PPC or Gause Rifle?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
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.
"Its brain -- a 40-pound computer system tucked inside its body --"
You know it's got to be powerful when compute power is measured in pounds...
jeff
I wonder, will they teach it to wet its circuits as well?
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?
I for one welcome our new robotic warlords!!!
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Humorous geeky reference for the not so geeky:
"...it became self aware on August 29th 1997 2:14 am Eastern Time."
Humorous geeky reference for the really geeky:
Horray, we've developed an Ogre Mk. I!
On a related note, these military robots use "swarm technology" to mimic a group of ants or other "swarm" animals. Kind of a cool approach to A.I. At least it's not nanotechnology like in the (bad) novel by Michael Crichton.
Tech News, Reviews and Tutorials
http://www.johnringo.com/stryker.htm
This article/FAQ is very unkind to the Stryker.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
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.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/con gress/ 2003_rpt/stryker_reality_of_war.pdf
Highlights?
- Designed to be transportable by a C-130, but can't.
- Designed for the modern urban battlefield, but too big to make a U-turn on even the widest streets.
- Designed to face the weapons of our enemies, but the armor cannot withstand Rocket Propelled Grenades (a hugely prolific weapon in Iraq and Afganistan, even now).
To top it all off, the light tank varient of the Stryker (which the entire Stryker Brigade concept relies upon for support) cannot fire it's weapon if infantry troops are within 200' (the muzzle blast will fry them due to the huge compensator needed) and the cannon cannot be fired off to the side of the vehicle, or the recoil will knock it over. What a great piece of equipment!
Not to hijack the thread, but this is just another attempt for General Dynamics to get some good press out of a complete piece of shit program that is endangering the lives of the grunts who are forced to work with it.
Oh, so the Pentagon is now doing the whole "bidding for contracts" thing?
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
>
> Maybe Peace would be better.
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"
Big deal! The taxi driver I had today is a ladies scanner.. He checks out up to 120 girls per second while driving, plus he talks on the cell phone, listens to some foreign music, and navigates the mean streets of NYC -- all while avoiding the I.N.S.
"Ain't I a stinka..." - Bugs
>>The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea... ...or on the borders. This device would be perfect for monitoring the enormous (and easily penetrated) US/Mexico and US/Canadian borders.
How long before a marine version is developed to patrol the coastal areas?
This is the same Stryker that has such thin armor around the enormous wheel wells that machine-gun bullets can penetrate, would kill its own crew if the turret howitzer were fired, and is best taken out via a simple molotov cocktail setting fire to its tires. It is intended to be air-deployed, but is so close to the weight margin that some armor had to be eliminated. In some configurations the Stryker has to be split across 3 planes and assembled on-site. Oh, and the thing is the size of a school bus--just what you want in urban situations requring manouverability, which is supposedly among its missions.
The Stryker is a mistake--I can see why they'd bolt the robot onto it in order to keep funding going, or to mask the sunk cost on this turkey. I couldn't find the PDF detailing these problems, so try this link: stryker problems Right now it's most interesting as an example of the strength of momentum some defense procurement contracts have.
Remain calm! All is well!
Public opinon didn't stop the recent war in Iraq.
Though, in general I do agree with you. What happens when we get a strung out general who decides to program his bots to kill anything in site.
"Except," he continued, "those pesky innocent civilians, who have complicated serious warmaking efforts for ages via their hostile acts of living on our battlegrounds. Well, they can now be slaughtered with even greater efficiency by soulless robots in their ever-growing search for weapons of mass destruction."
"I mean, remember that guy who stopped the tank at Tiennamen by standing in front of it? Ha! Good luck using that tactic against TankMaster v.06a! To it, that brave individual would register simple as 'non-threat to navigation object'. El squish-o."
Note to the General Dynamics guys who are working on this one: Thanks a bunch. This ought to make the life of any petty dictator, from Castro to Dick Cheney, far easier. I mean, bet you'll never see a robot put its chopper between a bunch of fleeing civilians and other robots who are massacring them.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
But whey would you replace the driver of a PERSONNEL carrier???
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
Ask any Infantryman what he thinks of the Stryker and he will tell you, in more colorful language most likely, that he absolutely hates it. It's a poorly coneived vehicle that was originally intended to transport Infantry squads around. The units currently deployed in Iraq have a pathetic iron cage that was added to the outside of them that is supposed to act as a net to catch rocket-propelled grenades because the skin of the Styrker is too thin to protect against them (this was just added recently when the Stryker was sent to Iraq, for some reason nobody ever thought this was necessary before the guys who actually had to ride in them said fuck it). New units are planned but they will be considerably heavier and slower due to a thicker skin (which defeats the original intention of having a quick moving vehicle in the first place).
The Army really should abandon putting more research into the Stryker and devert that funding elsewhere where it will actually be useful.
Just a soldier's 2 cents.
Just to correct this, "Ladar" (aka "Lidar", "Laser Radar") does not emit radar signals. It only emits laser pulses and measures the time-of-flight of the light signal (sometimes uses phase shift of laser pulses for better precision). I'm betting the reporter heard "Laser Radar" as "Laser and Radar". Or perhaps they have a separate radar unit.
I'm also curious about the 400,000 points per second. There are some experimental flash (aka scannerless) ladars that get some pretty good rates, but not that many and AFAIK this isn't one of them. The best I can find on the web is that the Stryker Ladars can get up to 60,000 range samples per second. I'm guessing the 400,000 is actually pulses, but it can take many pulses to make a single measurement depending on the type of ladar and the range resolution.
Stryker is designed as an in-between vehicle between the Bradley and a tank. Most of its firepower is actually in its infantry dismounts.
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.