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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."
How utterly ridiculous. Grown men wasting tax payer $ to play real life video games. It just goes to show you how much money can be wasted on 'defense' spending, and no one bats an eyelid.
Practicing 'defense' produces a desire to prove it. The next step to that end is the creation of conflict itself.
Chicken, meet egg. See you both in hell.
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.
These people have too much taxpayer money. Let's divert their funding into something useful and ignore the army whinging about having limited bullets for training exercises like we ignore legitimate complaints about a lack of funding in vital areas.
I know people who are fans of the American military-industrial complex's products will hold the exact opposite opinion about how all those taxes that are levied on Australians should be divided up.
Did they run out of niggers? Cheaper, don't have any other use and you don't feel guilty plugging them.