Armed ground robots

[netmouse]

remotely-operated ground vehicles (robots) with guns are being deployed in Iraq. How'd you like to face down a robot with an M-249 machine gun? Or a grenade launcher? The program calls them "special weapons observation remote reconnaissance direct action systems" (SWORDS). So far they have not been in a firefight. Yet.

Comments

[rmeidaking.livejournal.com]

In pondering this overnight, can the robot remove a blanket dropped on its head? A blind robot might be a sitting duck.

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

So far the robots in use by our military cannot secure themselves. In Iraq there's a small problem with having them stolen for their batteries, so units guard them very carefully.


One of my favorite stories from the Michigan bomb squad was when they sent a domestic unit into a house by a remote control (RF) and an inhabitant took it out of their control by taking a baseball bat to its antenna array. That robot wasn't armed, of course.

Then again, robots tend to have cameras in unexpected places. This robot would not be made blind by "Having a blanket dropped on its head" because it has forward and reverse cameras on the carriage down between the wheels in addition to the cameras on its arm and body or weapons package that are used for self-inspection and targeting. It also might have non-visual sensors that would not be incapacitated by a blanket, and it will be able to do dead-reckoning navigation based on GPS and internal position estimation.

I expect large and midsize robots to eventually have a 360-degree view and the ability to monitor their own input for approaching people. How they will react to possible aggressors is still unknown. IR and radar/sonar are also very useful for those things. I don't know if the SWORD system has those sensors, but ground robots they're using for search and rescue do.