Re: [DS2][SG2] Robot Dogs

At 12:02 AM 8/11/99 +0100, you wrote:
>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.

As far as I can tell, the development of this kind of autonomous weapon
is
basically what is delaying US signature to the land mine treaty...
basically, they want a replacement first, so they can sign it and then
put
in an end-run that is possibly even more dangerous to civilians than
land
mines (after all, once a land mine has gone off, it's no longer
dangerous).

Also, the Berlin Wall (in certain places) was protected (on the Soviet
side) by machineguns that were autonomously controlled (tripwires, as I
understand it).
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http://home.earthlink.net/~thewolkes

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