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Military Robots Get Machine Guns

Posted by samzenpus on from the remote-war dept.

javaxman writes "Next spring, the U.S. military is expecting to deploy Talon robots with machine guns. They can also be equiped with rocket launchers. Really, they're remote-controlled 'bots, not true autonomous 'bots, so you can save the Skynet jokes for, um, some day in the not-to-distant future. This is just the first, or maybe second step. As for me, I just want to see arena matches between gangs of these suckers. Robot wars indeed!"

14 of 665 comments (clear)

  1. Captured robots by fembots · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Can these robots be captured and reconfigured to turn against its ex-master, or do they have self-destruction function?

    This reminds me of an old Canon printer advertisement, where the Martians use this bubblejet printer to print realistic Mars landscape photos and place them in front of the Mars probe's visual sensor.

    --
    Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
    1. Re:Captured robots by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      As long as they remember to enable the WEP security.

    2. Re:Captured robots by Hobadee · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Comon, all of us here at Slashdot should know this. Rule #1 of hacking: He who has access to the physical device, controls the device. It would be all too easy to crack the case of one of these things and change the crystal so that instead of running off of who-knows-what frequency it's now controlled with a 72MHz RC controller! Personally, I don't want these things going into battle for us. We're gonna spend billions on these things and some kid somewhere is gonna come up with an 80 cent way to turn it against us. (Think along the lines of "drawing a circle around the circumference with a pernament marker".)

      --
      ...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
    3. Re:Captured robots by Rei · · Score: 5, Insightful

      True, although it's amazing what data you can gather from something unintelligable. A friend of mine who used to work as a translator for US army intelligence intercepts mentioned how at one point, the Soviets had figured out a system to tell what commands our troops were issuing during war games. They weren't able to decrypt our messages, mind you. They simply figured out that different messages had different lengths, and tended to be broadcast at different times, different orders, etc - and matched them up with the meanings (we fixed this when we found out, of course)

      Now, tricks like this (probably not these exact tricks) likely wouldn't let you send commands to the bot; however, they might let you know what is being sent to the bot, and what it is sending back.

      Personally, I'm kinda curious as to how effective tempest attacks would be against "secure" communication devices, especially radios. I mean, radios make sounds by using pulsed magnetic fields to vibrate a diaphragm - sounds like a good way to broadcast unwanted RF to me ;) Sure, your range wouldn't be great, but in urban combat, who knows - it could possibly prove effective.

      --
      "99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
  2. A trend by DrLZRDMN · · Score: 5, Funny

    Didn't they get shotguns about a month ago? From what I can tell they'll have rocket launchers by the begining of next year.

    1. Re:A trend by prockcore · · Score: 5, Funny

      Didn't they get shotguns about a month ago? From what I can tell they'll have rocket launchers by the begining of next year.

      I just hope they don't get Quad Damage.

    2. Re:A trend by a1cypher · · Score: 5, Funny

      What if we gave them a whole variety of weapons that could be rotated through. Such as a hand gun, machine gun, gatling gun, rocket launcher, shotgun, etc...

      Then we could interface the machine with an FPS game and let people select weapons with the mouse scroll wheel.. And it can pick up any munitions, "health packs" or "armor shards" that it happens to "find" and maybe even throw grenades..

      hrm.... And then you could get a whole bunch of them and stick them in one location, "map" if you will where they can duke and nuke it out forever.

      oh wait...

  3. What about ethics? by SlashdotMirrorer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Whatever happened to Asimov's rules of robots that they can do no harm to humans? For years, bearded terminal hackers have done their thing, hacking on software, hardware, and such, with little regard to the ethics of the situation. But now, with our creations affecting mankind in a more profound way, we give little more thought to ethics than we did with a simple BASIC shell script.

    Think about this the next time you are coding a servo controller on your Redhat compiler. Could your code be misused in a way you would not approve?

  4. Johnny Five ... ALIVE! by omghi2u · · Score: 5, Funny

    Johnny Five ... ALIVE!

    Need I say more?

    1. Re:Johnny Five ... ALIVE! by Sepper · · Score: 5, Funny

      I can already see the battlefield of the future:

      Number 5: "Hey laser lips! Your momma was a snowblower!"

      --
      I live in Soviet Canuckistan you insensitive clod!
  5. Lemming? by dev_alac · · Score: 5, Funny

    Did anyone else notice the page file was lemming.htm?

  6. Human oversight by grunt547 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    From the article:
    "Driving, observing and shooting are always done with a man in the loop," the Foster-Miller spokesman said. "The labs like autonomy, but the users themselves always like to have control."
    It's really not too shocking to think about a computer in charge of deadly force. Sure, think about Arnold in Terminator, but this is not a new idea. We've put computers in charge of our weapons systems for years. Back in the days when strategic bombers with nuclear weapons were our primary deterrent, the computer (such as it existed in the 50s and 60s) was in charge of dropping the bombs. This was even more common on conventional platforms, where accuracy actually mattered. The computer can figure out where the best place to pickle off the bomb is, and all the pilot does is flip a consent switch that actually allows the plane to release a weapon. All the pilot knew was that the bomb would release at some point. This system offers a lot more control to the human operator, who I guess will be playing an FPS in real-life.
  7. We already have autonomous firing systems by ca1v1n · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The Patriot Missile system fires with no human intervention. It uses an Identification Friend-or-Foe system to track everything in the air, and shoot down anything that shouldn't be there. During the recent Iraq invasion, a glitch in this system caused it to fire upon a British fighter jet, destroying it and killing its pilot. It was about to do the same to a US jet, but that jet was armed with fast-flying radar-seeking missiles designed to take out hostile SAM sites, and was able to take out the radar component of the Patriot system before the missile reached his plane. Notably no one was injured on the ground when he did this, since there was nobody actually sitting in front of the device, or anywhere near it.

    I think it'll be a long time before autonomously firing ground systems are in place, because it's hard enough doing IFF in the sky, let alone on the ground. I think the fire-finder system (used in the Balkans to take out mortar positions in the mountains firing upon cities) might do this in some limited capacity, but that's only anti-artillery, rather than telling the difference between a guerilla carrying an RPG and a farmer carrying a section of irrigation pipe. Sure, you could wait until they shoot first for all of these systems, since that's a lot easier to determine automatically, but I think it's quite obvious that waiting for the other guy to shoot first is very far from the policy of the current administration.

    --
    WARNING: there is a trojan on your
  8. Re:Not so bad... by Grey+Tomorrow · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think you are missing the point that only fewer soldiers on OUR SIDE die. The casulaties on the other will make up for the discrepancy.