Listen up contractors, Uncle Sam wants you to develop a “Multi-Robot Pursuit System” to go after “non-cooperative” humans. Before you utter a resounding “wtf?” consider this: last year iRobot cooked up a deal with Taser International to mount stun weapons on military robots. Wait…what? Now we will have roaming packs of bots tasing hippies? Pretty much.
Steve Wright, expert on police/military tech from Leeds Metropolitan University said of pack-hunting bots:

What we have here are the beginnings of something designed to enable robots to hunt down humans like a pack of dogs. Once the software is perfected we can reasonably anticipate that they will become autonomous and become armed.

We can also expect such systems to be equipped with human detection and tracking devices including sensors which detect human breath and the radio waves associated with a human heart beat. These are technologies already developed.

Wonderful. You can see the DoD request here, and get a glimpse at what a future where robots hunt humans in packs might look like here.

[NewScientist]

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 7:49 pm and is filed under Military, Research. Be sure to subscribe to the Botropolis.com feed because it is really, really awesome. Have something you want to share? Please let us know.

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