South Korea unveils gun-toting sentry robot

[Robbien]

The weapons-grade robot can detect, raise the alarm, and provide suppressive fire, said Lee Jae-Hoon, deputy minister of commerce, industry, and energy. "The Intelligent Surveillance and Guard Robot has surveillance, tracking, firing, and voice recognition systems built into a single unit," he added.

Lee said that hundreds of the robots could be deployed along the 155-mile-long (248 kilometer) demilitarized zone bisecting the two Koreas as well as along the country's coastline and at military airfields. With modifications, they could also be used to guard civilian installations such as airports, power stations, and oil pipelines.

Equipped with visual and infra-red detection capabilities, the sentry robot can spot moving objects up to four kilometers (2.5 miles) away during the day and half that distance at night. Via "pattern recognition," it can distinguish between humans, cars, or trees at two kilometers in daytime and one kilometer at night. Suppressive fire can be provided by a machine gun on top.

The robot was developed by a group of four institutions including Samsung Techwin Co. and Korea University over three years at a cost of some $10 million in government and private funds. Each costs 190 million won ($200,000) and the developers expect to sell around $200 million worth of them when they go on sale late next year.

http://www.metimes.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20060928-042215-5882r

[Matariki]

1. Suppressive fire?

that's a 'quaint' term for shooting people.

[zonkers]

2. What they are decribing is the opening scene in Terminator.

[Poll_Blind]

3. "weapons-grade robot" I don't like the sound of that. n/t

PB

[Webster Green]

4. Great idea!......Nothing could possibly go wrong with that thing!

:eyes:

[thingfisher]

5. supressive fire

WoW! Looks like our border patrol problems are solved!

[Cobalt-60]

6. Ed 209

[EmperorHasNoClothes]

7. Oh, this is a GREAT idea.

Haven't they ever seen Robocop?

[phantom power]

8. This has been in the cards for a long time.

But I must say, I wasn't expecting it quite yet. And not from SK(!)

[BrotherBuzz]

11. The US Army already has their version

A cross between a tank and a soldier, the latest feat of military husbandry makes Robocop look like Officer Friendly. Combining a lightweight robot built by military contractor Foster-Miller for reconnaissance in Bosnia with a remote-control machine-gun mount invented by Northern California engineer Graham Hawkes, this is the world’s first land-based telepresent combat weapon—a deadly-accurate surrogate gunner that needs no sleep and will never come home in a casket. The Army calls it SWORDS (Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Direct-action System), and it will deploy 18 units for active duty in Iraq next month. Each $230,000 robot will tote standard-issue automatic rifles capable of firing up to 1,000 rounds a minute without flinching. “SWORDS won’t replace soldiers, but it will aid them,” says Foster-Miller project manager Dan Deguire.

I knew Graham Hawkes for years and remember him designing and building the gun back in 2002 and turning it over to the military to test it. I was surprised to see they had adopted it, created the platform, and deployed it.

[phantom power]

15. What surprised me is, the SK version is fully automated. No tele-op.

[daleo]

9. This definitely goes against "the three laws of robots". n/t

[MGD]

10. The U.S. has robotic weapons too.

We have flying land mines that are capable of jumping up into the air and chasing a person or a vehicle down and little robot crabs that walk around on a beach looking for land mines to destroy. We have little flying explodey things that will silently chase down heat signatures i.e. people and blow them up too. Our robots communicate with one another too in order to avoid attacking the same targets. I've seen some kind of roving flying sentry type thing too. I imagine it coordinates with the other robots somehow. Robotics isa high priority in R and D. Even scarier is the nanotechnology that their pouring millions into. We're talking about self-replicating silicone based robots that can't be seen without a microscope. Talk about a computer virus.

[Endangered Specie]

12. Sooo.... anyone up for a game of DOOM3?

[lfairban]

14. Yea, I thought of that message in a PDA that said . . .

. . . one of the employees was almost shot, "That's right, shot!" by a sentry bot who thought he was an enemy just because the employee was having a bad day.

I always liked them, they were very useful, but you have to be careful not to get in front of them because they can shoot you when they fire at an adversary.

[Karenina]

13. Nutty Homo Sapiens...

spreading their sick shit on this lovely orb... :freak:

[w4rma]

16. Pattern recognition software is the biggest hurdle in automated robotics.

It is *very* *very* tough to write a program that can analyze video (from two sources, for depth perception, at that) and pick out and identify objects and their distances accurately.

I highly doubt that this pattern recognition system isn't easy to fool.