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Aussie Army Trains With Fleet of Robots On Segways
kkleiner writes "The armed forces of the world have already begun to hunt down and shoot robots. No, it's not the beginning of the man-machine war; it's a state-of-the-art training simulation that's very cool to watch. Australia-based Marathon Robotics has taken Segways and turned them into human-shaped autonomous robots capable of moving around streets and buildings just like people in a crowd! The Marathon bots can act like insurgents, hostages, or civilians, letting armed soldiers practice before being exposed to the real thing. The Australian Department of Defense already has a training camp using the robots, and the US Marine Corps will be establishing one this year."
But when they want "unprecedented levels of realism" in a training scenario against real people, why not use real people?
I like your enthusiasm, but most civvies get upset at the idea of being used as live-fire targets. They won't even let us use the prisoners from Gitmo!
Outside of the odd practice with live ammo it doesn't like there's even good reason to simply invent a better non-lethal training weapon.
Ah, I see the confusion. You didn't actually RTFA. No big surprise.
These robots are intended specifically for live-fire training. For everything else, we certainly DO use real people.