South Korea To Develop Army and Police Robots

JonathanGCohen writes "South Korea is planning on developing an advanced line of robots for military and police use by the 2010 decade. A $34 million USD infusion of cash will spur development and result in robotic applications like security watchmen and eight-legged autonomous combat vehicles. "

Comments

Dead Or Alive... You're comming with meeee

[catahoula10]

Can the S.Koreans really build something like this? It seemed Japan was far more advanced in Robotics.

Re:The Cops, The Criminals & The Civil Fruitca

[Belseth]

If the Robo-Cops hits the streets, the invention of small EMP grenades won't be too far behind. As an American citizen, do I have the constitutional right to bear EMP grenades? Or would EMP grenades fall into the same classification as regular explosive grenades?

Two problems with that senerio. First EMP weapons at last word were still a rumor even for the military. If they do exist they would bulky and probably produce a fair amount of radiation. It isn't that easy to produce a field strong enough to knock out electronics.

The other issue is if that were a risk it's possible to harden hardware electronics from EMP fields. A lot of military hardware is already. I'd be real surprised if it was ever possible to produce an EMP gernade. In some ways it's not that different than trying to make a nuclear hand gernade. They may have had them in Starship Troopers but they don't exist in the real world and there's no way to make one with current understanding of physics. Even the brief case bombs were never proven and those are considerably larger than a handgernade. I tend to believe they are possible from what I've read and seen but I'm not 100% convinced one has been made.

There's far easier ways to take out a robot than an EMP bomb. Part of the draw back to most battle robots are they aren't really that tough. You'll notice most have stuck with a wheeled or tank tread approach. Wheels and tank treads are tougher and more efficent than walking machines. A two or four legged robot would have the same frailties as well as advantages of an animal with the same number of legs. The biggest problem always is trying to make motors small enough and strong enough to make walking possible. Equalling a human for strength, speed and endurance is far harder than it looks and it's a very long way to the bionic man.

Re:Why is it the Koreans?

[odibil]

Well, the pattern that you point out seems reasonable and make sense... :) Japan is one of the countries with the greatest portion of elderly people... South Korea is putting more than 300 thousand sentrymen to watch out for their heavily fortified border with that crazy North Korea, and replacing those sentrymen with the "guard robots" will have a huge positive economic effect.