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Army Eyes Anti-Sniper Robot
Hiawatha writes "iRobot has teamed up with Boston University to create a robot that can spot enemy snipers on a battlefield. Before the smoke of the shot clears away, the REDOWL robot should have the shooter in its sights." iRobot is the same company that brought you the popular Roomba robotic vacuum.
Besides, he said, it would be dangerous to have a weapon-toting robot that could open fire on its own.
''You need to have a man in the loop," he said.
The article says that the robot would not return fire, it would just pinpoint where the shooting is coming from. So, why does it need to be a robot exactly? Why wouldn't it just be a comptuer with some cameras and microphones?
One idea is that our soldiers could have a chip in their dogtags that the robot could identify so as to not shoot at them. Then you would have the problem of the enemy stealing people's dog tags, but maybe you could deactivate that code once you knew the enemy had the tag.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Back in the old days, before Rod Brooks started iRobot, I worked part-time at a small MIT AI Lab spinoff making robots for kids called Turtles. The Turtle was an outcome of Logo, and, which itself was an outgrowth of Lisp, and so somehow the company's name got on a list of AI and Robotics vendors. (Sidenote: Lego Mindstorms also came from this same group of people at MIT and industry, though not this particular startup.)
Anyway, we got a letter from a defense contractor asking for "applications of our AI and robotics products to battlefield logistics" and gave a half-dozen or so areas for us to evaluate our products.
As you can imagine, puzzlement gave way to amusement, which quickly gave way to mayhem and by 3:05AM we had started writing our response, starting off with "The Turtle enjoys very low observability, due to a minimal radar cross-section and an almost non-existent infra-red signature."
The letter made the rounds on the photocopy/bulletin-board circuit (there was no electronic copy available outside), and somehow the response got published in an ACM journal. Through the magic of modern imaging, it is available for you to read today in PDF.
I admit that I know nothing about this technology, at all, but in my imagination, I would like to think that a technology such as the one used for hunting via the internet would be a little better. At least a real human would have the ability to decide when and where to shoot rather than relying on code to decide whether or not the target is friend of foe.
;-).
Just a thought, though I admit that a robot has a lot more of the geek quality many of us would like to see
My lame blog.
I few years ago I think one of the Discovery channels had something on an optical bullet tracker, I'm not sure if it was from Trex or not. Basically, it took advantage of the fact that bullets move much faster than anything in their vicinity, so the only major differences between successive images from a high-speed digital camera would most likely be the bullets. They had a cool demo system where the camera was pointing at a shooting gun in the distance, and it was highlighting the trajectories of the bullets it detected on a computer screen, with all of the lines converging on the gun. Couple this optical system with acoustic triangulation, and you have the best of both systems: zero in the camera quickly on the general source of the shots using sound, then pin-point the exact source of the bullets optically. Eventually this system could be made compact enough to fit on top of a rifle like a digital scope.
It depends on what you mean by "win." You see, for the case in Iraq at the moment their fighters are culturally influenced by Asian and Steppe fighting methods (the history of this stems from Sun Tzu and other cultural writings being moved along the Silk Road and also from Mongol invasions) which posits that running away is in fact winning in their mindset. The western mindset, which you so eloquently put in your example of winning, is about fighting the enemy in a decisive battle and if the enemy runs that is a "win" in our mindset. So at a tactical level our western mindset might see it as a win but for the enemy it is part of a longer term strategic culture that champions running away to fight again another day.