Saturday, October 25, 2008

Why Slashdot is a good news source

OMG, it took the justice system years to crack down on Jon Burge, notorious police commander who promoted torture as an interrogation technique in Chicago. Drones routinely bomb innocents, oh I mean collateral damage, in Pakistan. Now the military wants packs of robots. Anyone seen John Connor or his ma lately?

Packs of Robots Will Hunt Down Uncooperative Humans






Ostracus writes "The latest request from the Pentagon jars the senses. At least, it did mine. They are looking for contractors to 'develop a software/hardware suite that would enable a multi-robot team, together with a human operator, to search for and detect a non-cooperative human subject. The main research task will involve determining the movements of the robot team through the environment to maximize the opportunity to find the subject ... Typical robots for this type of activity are expected to weigh less than 100 Kg and the team would have three to five robots.'"
To be fair, they plan to use the Multi-Robot Pursuit System for less nefarious-sounding purposes as well. They note that the robots would "have potential commercialization within search and rescue, fire fighting, reconnaissance, and automated biological, chemical and radiation sensing with mobile platforms."
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