Roomba of Doom
I have a love hate relationship with my roomba. It does a good job cleaning up, but hes a needy pain in the ass sometimes, with a weak battery and a desire to get his large schnoz stuck on some room divider and lift his 1 inch wheels off the ground.
I think the relationship would be a whole lot different with this little guy:
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/05/metal-storm-iro.html
In case you dont know them, metal storm is a australian company developing an entirely new way of firing a gun. Forget the hammer, pin, and moving parts generally. You stack a bunch of bullets in a barrel, and fire them electronically. You can feed more in etc, but basically it lets you fire very very rapidly, and with little maintaince etc.
Now, put one of those on the back of a iRobot Warrior bot, and you have quite a weapons system. Yes, Foster-Miller has had a few .50cal equipped bots running around in Iraq, but I just like iRobot better. Because they made Norm Jr. and because they are not a typical giant defense contractor.
The thing is, the roles these things will be used for are the dangerous and boring ones, just like every other kind of automation the military has ever used. At first. It is one step towards the robot army this nation is striving for, and an important one. Dont worry, Skynet is not taking over any time soon, but more and more work will be carried out without fear of danger. Sometime, I will write a whole section on autonomous or remotely controlled fighting vehicles, but right now, suffice it to say that the ability to act without risk is a severe unbalancing of power.
I think the relationship would be a whole lot different with this little guy:
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/05/metal-storm-iro.html
In case you dont know them, metal storm is a australian company developing an entirely new way of firing a gun. Forget the hammer, pin, and moving parts generally. You stack a bunch of bullets in a barrel, and fire them electronically. You can feed more in etc, but basically it lets you fire very very rapidly, and with little maintaince etc.
Now, put one of those on the back of a iRobot Warrior bot, and you have quite a weapons system. Yes, Foster-Miller has had a few .50cal equipped bots running around in Iraq, but I just like iRobot better. Because they made Norm Jr. and because they are not a typical giant defense contractor.
The thing is, the roles these things will be used for are the dangerous and boring ones, just like every other kind of automation the military has ever used. At first. It is one step towards the robot army this nation is striving for, and an important one. Dont worry, Skynet is not taking over any time soon, but more and more work will be carried out without fear of danger. Sometime, I will write a whole section on autonomous or remotely controlled fighting vehicles, but right now, suffice it to say that the ability to act without risk is a severe unbalancing of power.
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