US military embraces robot revolution

PATUXENT RIVER NAVAL AIR STATION, Maryland: Robots in the sky and on the ground are transforming warfare, and the US military is rushing to recruit the new warriors that never sleep and never bleed. The latest robotics were on display at an industry show this week at a naval airfield in Maryland, with a pilotless helicopter buzzing overhead and a “Wall-E” look-alike robot on the ground craning its neck to peer into a window. The chopper, the MQ-8B Fire Scout, is no tentative experiment and later this year will be operating from a naval frigate, the USS McInerney, to help track drug traffickers in the eastern Pacific Ocean, Navy officers said. The rugged little robot searching an enemy building is called a Pakbot, which can climb over rocks with tank treads, pick up an explosive with its mechanical arm and dismantle it while a soldier directs the machine from a safe distance. There are already 2,500 of them on the round in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a lighter version weighing six kilograms has arrived that can be carried in a backpack, according to Robot, the same company that sells a robot vaccum to civilians, the Roomba. Monday’s demonstration of robotic wonders was organised by defence contractors and the US Navy, which says it wants to lead the American military into a new age. “I think we’re at the beginning of an unmanned revolution,” Gary Kessler, who oversees unmanned aviation programmes for the US Navy and Marines, told AFP. “We’re spending billions of dollars on unmanned systems.” Kessler and other Pentagon officials compare the robots to the introduction of the aircraft or the tank, a new technology that dramatically changes strategy and tactics. Robots or “unmanned systems” are now deployed by the thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan, spying from the sky for hours to search for booby-traps and firing lethal missiles without putting US soldiers at risk....>>