Robotics Technology Center

Pentagon to Deploy Autonomous Fighting Robots in Battlefields

It looks like we're gearing towards robotic warfare! Have you seen the movie "District 9"?, although the bad guys were aliens, the concept of robotic war is evident. That was fiction though.

In real life, more than 5000 lethal and nonlethal robots, with remote human intervention have already been deployed at the battlefields, like Iraq and Afghanistan. However, unmanned bombings continually occur in places where civilian casualties are high.

In the effort to reduce if not eliminate casualties of war, DARPA has financed a project that will launch autonomous or self-governing, armed robots that could find and destroy targets on their own. On-board computer programs, not humans would decide whether to fire their weapons or not.

This project has gained controversies on the past months, concerning machines will be unable to distinguish between legitimate targets and civilians in a war zone. But as the number of civilian and military casulaties are increasing, there is no more time to lay-back on making more autonomous robots become the forefronts in the battlefields. These autonomous armed robotic systems probably will be operating by 2020, and the decision to deploy them, will be left to Pentagon.

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