Re: [DS2][SG2] Robot Dogs

On Mon, 9 Aug 1999, Eli Arndt wrote:

> Well, I do know that right now robots can be used for ambushing tanks.
 They 
> can roll out, wait for weeks and hit anything crossing an area of the
road 
> or terrain they cover.  I think the robot I'm talking about is a
Fireant or 
> something like that. Discovery Channel loves to show it in shows on
military 
> hardware.  It stnds to reason that a low-grade robot could be set up
to 
> snipe at soft targets too.  A tripod with servoes, a small logic unit,
a 
> good multi-optic scope al lattached to a rifle and bingo - sort of
like a 
> careful 'Sentry Gun'.

it's not quite that simple. tanks are easy to see - they are big, move
in
fairly straight lines, are made of metal and generally have rather hot
exhausts somewhere. thus, you can detect them with optics, radar or
infrared, or set tripwires, pressure sensors, etc, and be able to find
them well enough to hit with a rocket (tanks are also quite large).

people are not so easy to hit.	they don't show up on radar, and on
optics
and millimetric radar are hard to distinguish from background - this is
the 'vision problem' of artificial intelligence research, and it's
nowhere
near solved. you can probably pick people out in IR, but then you have
to
filter out other sources of heat, and you're back to the vision problem.

tom