Street Fighting Robot Challenge

ianchaos writes "There's no better way to assure the eventual destruction of mankind than by the event sponsored by Singapore's Defence Science and Technology Agency. Newscientist has a good writeup of the robot challenge, which is to build a robot that can operate autonomously in urban warfare conditions, moving in and out of buildings to search and destroy targets like a human soldier."

Comments

Re:Cheaper to Kill? How Much Is Our Image Worth?

[wasted]

It is much easier, more effective and cheaper to kill humans than to render them unable to continue combat but still alive. Afterward, corpses don't sue or raise a human rights ruckus. And remember, we're talking about Singapore, not the U.S.

I've seen cops (in riot situations) revert to these zip ties that are similar to what I tie the cables in my computer up with. The cop takes a zip tie, forces the individuals arms behind his or her back and applies the zip tie.

These zip ties cost maybe 10 or 20 cents each. They are not fool proof. And the way in which you get the human into the physical position to apply the zip ties is a problem an engineer has yet to solve. But if you're telling me that this is too expensive. Or that, in the aftermath of the war, the individual (who at no time had any risk save maybe a broken arm through failed cooperation) will sue you. I will have to laugh. Have you priced bombs or even arms and ammunition recently? Not cheap. And through the use of those, the alternative is death. You can't put a price on life.

We were talking about robots. What is the probability that an enemy combatant will find a way to nullify the robots' non-lethal mode? Are you a programmer? Can you program the ability to ziptie a non-cooperative combatant as reliably as the ability to destroy a non-cooperative combatant? If the non-lethal, zip-tie, mode is nullified, the non-enemy combatant can be in harm's way, and die. And as you said,

You can't put a price on life.

My countrymens' life have a higher value than the enemy's countrymens' lives. But, the general in the field has to deal with this. So, he has to look at the consequces of dead enemies. Thanks to today's media, every dead enemy combatant has the potential to be a martyr.

Imagine if we found every Al-Queda member and marked them and made publicly known to everyone around them that they were part of an organization responsible for the deaths of innocent men, women & children, surely their families and societies would hold them as murderers. In our society, when your brother is murdered and you murder the person responsible, you are still tried for murder. Just because they did a crime does not give you the right to replicate the crime on them. And I think a lot of societies today agree with this or should come around to realizing that you can't let people murder each other. Justice & the truth are the only answers.

You obviously don't understand religious zealotry(sp?). Those who kill in the name of religion will kill regardless of what others think.