Probably, when he invented the first of the three laws of robotics, Isaac Asimov did not imagine that a day would come when the robots would be sent to war. Today that day has arrived, says Cecilia Stroe.
A magical oxymoron, like non-fat chocolate or spice-free rose, the casual war is currently feverish in the marketing departments of the main Defense ministries around the world; this is because if there were no victims, this collateral damage, the "product" called war would be perfect.
This is what some have called, with an economic term, the outsourcing of war. According to him, only the essential functions of the conflict (core-business) will still be the responsibility of the career militaries; the rest, that is, everything that can be outsourced, will fall on the head of the UCAV, the unmanned combat aerial vehicle, the mercenaries and the robots, who will deal with the "dirty" ".
Robots go to war
The Pentagon, with its budget of over $ 500 billion (half of total world military spending), is clearly on the front line for research in the field. Foster-Miller, a small Massachusetts company behind the Carlyle group, the controversial Washington investment trust at the crossroads of international military and political interests, recently produced the first 18 Swords - Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems - at the price of 230,000 USD piece. Builders were funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon research agency, under the Future Combat System program, to turn the US Army into the Military Three Military Force. The 18 are to be sent to Iraq. Will drones do a better job than human soldiers? Of course, Future Combat Systems, the most costly plan to reinvent an army ($ 127 billion) ever, counts on that. Corded tracks, cameras, infrared sight, proximity sensors, and a machine gun that spits 750 bullets per minute, the Swords will not have total autonomy but will be teleguided somewhere from a radius of 800 meters by a soldier with a laptop and a joystick.
While waiting for the great achievements of artificial intelligence, military experts praise the efficiency and discipline of the soldier-robot. Who does not sleep, does not eat and who does not have to teach him. On the front, the robot does not scare or forget orders, as Gordon Johnson, a Pentagon Joint Force Command Specialist, said. So the robot could become the soldier's best friend. Or almost, given that he does not have trouble if, next to him, a comrade was shot down; a perfect car of death, to whose disappearance no one will shed any tear.
And if 200,000 dollars, as a Talon drone - the robot capable of launching grenades and projectiles with absolute precision - is a lot of you, maybe you have to redo the calculations. At this time, the Pentagon owes its troops $ 653 billion, consisting of pensions and care. A military man spends on average US Administration $ 4 million, while a robot - only 10% of this amount. An argument that could not unleash competition. The IRobot Corporation in Burlington, Massachusetts, known for the Roomba intelligent vacuum cleaner, has already set up PackBots, small mechanized explorers who will search the caverns in search of terrorists, and R Gator, combat robots.
The fact that research in the field of remote vehicles is much more advanced in the case of so-called drones - spy planes and unmanned combat - is not a random one. From the first Predator, used during the Bosnian war in 1995, a robot who, in 2002, at the time of his first lethal mission in Yemen, shattered a 8,000-meter-high truck with six al Qaeda terror suspects, go further. In the sky above Baghdad or Kabul, there is now more drone than clouds, because a fleet of more than 800 Predators "visits" the area regularly. Another famous drone, capable of hitting ground targets, is Global Hawk, a production vehicle since 2003 and already driven into various military missions in Afghanistan.
The perfect war will be the one worn only between the robots, the Pentagon officials say. And if the use of ground robots is a novelty, their strategic advantage in this "wargame reality" will always come from the sky. As a matter of fact, as Bruce Sterling, a SF writer and military technology expert explains, ground robots are just a complementary capacity. So, beyond pure intimidation, Sterling thinks, the ideal use of Swords would be to leave them in remote areas where they might hide to watch, watch, and kill while being controlled from orbit.
FACTS
EU Security facts
In the near future, drones equipped with high-performance cameras will fly over the borders of the European Union, especially the sky above the Mediterranean and the Balkans. These "patrollers" of unmanned airplanes are part of a € 1.4 billion program by the European Commission to equip European police forces to combat illegal immigration and terrorism.
Acts of Robots' Tables
»Search and rescue
A "small" UAVs (drone) can "search" a much larger area than a human crew can do. The drone can automatically arrange itself in the most efficient band for an exploration mission and can fly in bad weather.
»Fighting with cancer
Nanoscale microscopes could one day be injected into the blood stream to fight cancer. These minibuses will "tell" each other when a tumor is located, delivering exact doses of chemotherapeutic drugs.
»Asteroids protection
MADMEN or Modular Asteroid Deflection Mission Ejector Nodes are space probes that can be used to deflect an asteroid pointing to the Earth through their combined pressure.
»Cleaning
Domestic robots such as Roomba from iRobot could replace service workers. In order to deretice, robots can adapt to any form and size of the building and are connected to the network to exchange information.
»Fighting with fire
During periods of high risk, a "fleet" of drones can keep the forested areas stretched under continuous surveillance. Triangulation with multiple UAVs can quickly locate the source of smoke.
" At play
Toy Robots are arranging themselves in more elaborate and "smarter" forms, according to NASA's ANTS model, in which miniature robots for exploring planets improve their mobility by combining into larger structures.
»Mobile phone relay
Powered by solar energy, a "dock" of drones could soon replace cellular antennae. Capable of managing much larger bandwidths, the network will reconfigure itself continuously.
The hive algorithm
Researchers at the University of Lausanne were among the first to copy the insect behavioral model to develop a multi-robot Alice system where each unit has the size of a sugar cube; with the help of two types of sensors, the robot "sees" up to a distance of 5 m, detecting the presence of another Alice with which to coordinate. Another type of super robot is called Swarm-bot.
They can be equipped with sensors for gas presence, infrared, communication systems and video cameras. The small size (10 cm) drove them to slip anywhere, their tracks are appropriate to the rugged areas, and hard, in the union the power: hooked to each other, the robots easily cross any obstacle encountered in the path. When one is broken, his mission is taken over by the rest, because in the world of super-robots no one is irreplaceable.
With drones in space
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is developing, in collaboration with NASA, a new satellite typology based on an idea by David Miller, director of the MIT Space Laboratory. The new satellites are nothing but small drones, the size of bowling balls, capable of moving both in the formation and alone and to easily complete various operations, thanks to the multitude of sensors and their own computer systems. According to Miller, who testified that he had been inspired for this project in the first episode of Star Wars, the drones would be extremely useful for facilitating space-based construction of large-scale structures such as Hubble's telescope.
The project is in an advanced phase: in August this year, Discovery carried two such drones aboard the International Space Station, and in December the third is expected. Previously, these prototypes flew at an altitude of 4,572 m in a NASA KC-135, so scientists can test their behavior in the absence of gravity.
Orwell's world - Robots, drones, sentinel plants
Accelerating military investment in scientific research dates back to the launch of Soviet Sputnik in 1957. Defense Advance Research Project Agency (DARPA) was set up one year later to prevent technological surprises made to the United States. Over the years, DARPA has shifted from defense to attack, the development of Stealth, the invisible bomber for radar, being an example of how the US agency has managed to use offensive key technology.
Currently, DARPA allocates about 98% of its annual foreign investment budget; a $ 3 billion rainfall over hundreds of companies and scientific departments of American universities dealing with microelectronics and nanotechnologies, artificial intelligence and genetic engineering. In 2003, researchers from Penn State University received a $ 3 million and a half-dollar funding from the Pentagon agency for the production of sentinel plants, whose function is to signal the presence of certain chemical agents in the environment to defeat such a possible bacteriological attack.
Another spin-off in the advanced phase of development is the so-called self-healing minefield, a mined field able to self-heal via a wireless connection system between me. Robots, drones, sentinel plants and mined fields are all clear signs that the withdrawal of human beings at the core of the war is a priority of military research. And where without soldiers they can not really, they are, of course, trying to control them as if they were robots.
DARPA's most orwellian research programs include LifeLog, an experimental phase technology that will allow the archiving of a database of all military experiences and monitoring of all their movements through GPS. When superiors will need, they will be able to rebuild the past of each soldier by simply consulting the virtual memory. To check why the humanoid does not respond properly to orders.
source:descopera.ro
