Armed Robots Not Actually Gone From Iraq

NightFalcon90909 writes "You may have heard that armed robots were yanked from Iraq after a gun started to swivel without it being told to do so. 'A recent news report that armed robots had been pulled out of Iraq is mistaken, according to the company that makes the robot [Foster-Miller] and the Army program manager. 'The whole thing is an urban legend,' says Foster Miller spokesperson Cynthia Black, of the reports about SWORDS moving its gun without a command.'"

Comments

It's Inevitable

[Al Mutasim]

Three false moves prior to certification is not a problem. Compare this to false moves by soldiers carrying rifles, which are universal. Even if a robot were to point its gun in the wrong direction, the person controlling it, and there always is one, would not pull the trigger. The Army will (and should) let the Talon see action. Gun-shooting robots are inevitable.

Department of redundancy department

[Ctrl-Z]

The article is worth it just for this quote: "So, now there is now redundant wiring on every circuit."

EX-TER-MI-NATE!

[Aquaseafoam]

EX-TER-MI-NATE! EX-TER-MI-NATE! *Cough* Hrm hrm... If a crossed wire can cause the gun to swivel, then a crossed wire can also cause the gun to fire. Anyone else surprised to see that they failed to include multiple redundancies? Of course, one could put forward the argument that the more redundancies there are, the more there is to go wrong.

Someone who works on robot sensors

[usul294]

I'm an engineer for a company that writes some of the signal analysis for robots, mostly military. They are designed to look for people, noise, or something easily sensible and train their guns on that location and await further instruction. Its a de facto law for military robot design that a human makes every firing decision, but the robot is allowed to aim and ask if it can fire. If a US soldier did something loud (shoot a gun, slam a door, yell) theres a good chance thats what set off the targeting routine. There was never any chance of a weapon being fired, except of course if there was a malicious operator. I have not worked on this type of robot, so I can't be sure of the process. There might be a user command that says "go look for target". If the robot looked for a target without ever being commanded that'd be a pretty horrendous software error.

Never Say Never

[bostongraf]

To all those saying that a human is "required" for the trigger, and it could "never" shoot on its own, I would like to remind you of this past October in South Africa:

"It appears as though the gun, which is computerised, jammed before there was some sort of explosion, and then it opened fire uncontrollably, killing and injuring the soldiers."

This was reported here: Wired Danger Room The most unreal quote from that link is (IMO) this:

But the brave, as yet unnamed officer was unable to stop the wildly swinging computerised Swiss/German Oerlikon 35mm MK5 anti-aircraft twin-barrelled gun. It sprayed hundreds of high-explosive 0,5kg 35mm cannon shells around the five-gun firing position. By the time the gun had emptied its twin 250-round auto-loader magazines, nine soldiers were dead and 11 injured.

The robot was set to reload automatically, as well, and the only reason it stopped firing is because they hadn't provided it with more cartridges.

Re:No autonomous but....

[SwordsmanLuke]

Disclaimer: I haven't worked on SWORD robots, but I have worked with the TALON on which the SWORDS are based.

The sort of scenario you describe is prevented with a heartbeat based killswitch. E.g. a signal is sent to the robot at a regular interval. If, for some reason, the heartbeat is not received, the robot immediately shuts down and stops moving. So, as you said, the robot "stops cold any time the transmission is having a hiccup." It can be a pain sometimes, but it's hell of a lot better than the alternative.

In the same way, dangerous commands (such as "shoot gun") require the robot to receive said command constantly in order to continue that action. So a robot being commanded to turn and fire just before losing comms would at worst, just turn, and typically do nothing.

Also: +1 Ironic Sig.