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The Brief Rise and Long Fall of Russia's Robot Tank

Posted by timothy on from the pew-pew-pew dept.

malachiorion writes with this report from Popular Science"Seventy-four years ago, Russia accomplished what no country had before, or has since: it sent armed ground robots into battle. These remote-controlled Teletanks took the field during one of WWII's earliest and most obscure clashes, as Soviet forces pushed into Eastern Finland for roughly three and a half months, from 1939 to 1940. The workings of those Teletanks were cool, though they were useless against Germany, and Russia proceeded to fall behind the developed world in military robotics."

2 of 79 comments (clear)

  1. Robot? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It was remote controlled. The V1 and V2 are much closer to a "robot" in the sense of a self-guided machine.

    1. Re:Robot? by meerling · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I agree, anything piloted by a human, even if remotely, doesn't really qualify as a robot.