Second Variety
The military's use of Predator aerial drones is already well known. They gained notoriety after being used to spy on Osama bin Laden and to kill six suspected al-Qaeda terrorists in Yemen in November 2002.
What is less well known is that the military is also using robots on the ground.
The Packbot is an unmanned, remote controlled robot used by the US Military to check caves in Afghanistan and to remove roadside bombs in Iraq. They have already seen some success:
A PackBot proved its worth last week when it uncovered a bomb in Iraq and was destroyed in the process.
"One robot was blown up," said retired Vice Adm. Joe Dyer, general manager of iRobot's government and industrial robotics division. "That was a cause for celebration, because the robot saved the life of a soldier."
iRobot, the manufacturer of the Packbot (as well as Roomba, the robot vacuum cleaner) foresees their new line of robots, SUGVs, leading our troops into battle within the next 10 years.
The robots, called small unmanned ground vehicles, or SUGVs, will detect the presence of chemical and biological weapons, identify targets for artillery and infantrymen, and ferret out snipers hiding inside urban buildings. Today, humans mainly perform these tasks, often becoming the first casualties of battle while looking for snipers or explosives.
iRobot envisions SUGVs eventually being equipped to shoot at targets, but they have put reconnaissance first, because of the difficulties associated with weaponizing the units. Apart from the problem of putting human soldiers out of work,
Robot vision systems have serious limitations, and the risk that a robot might kill an innocent civilian is too great, said iRobot CEO Colin Angle.
But Angle did not rule out the eventual use of weapons on robots, and noted that Raytheon is developing a targeting system for the SUGV.
"We're not using these robots to hand out flowers," Angle said.
The Pentagon seems to be enthusiastic about the possibilities. Its $14.7 billion Future Combat Systems program has chosen to include SUGVs. They see robotic systems as forming "the backbone of the [Army and Marine] force of the future."
Postscript: "Second Variety" refers to the Philip Dick short story (made into the B-rate movie Screamers) in which human soldiers - leftovers from World War III - hold out against the self-replicating, killer robots which they employed to "win" the war, only to lose control over them.
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