h+ Magazine
By Peter Rothman
5 November 2013
The period from 1500 B.C. to A.D. 100 was a time during which there occurred a genuine revolution in most aspects of people’s existence and organization. It was a period also characterized by a revolution in the manner of conducting warfare. This Iron Age was marked by almost constant war, a time in which states of all sizes came into existence only to be extinguished by the rise of still larger empires, which, in their turn, were destroyed by military force. During this time humankind refined the social structures that were essential to the functioning of genuinely large and complex social orders and, in doing so, brought into existence a new and more destructive form of warfare. The Iron Age also saw the practice of war firmly rooted in man’s societies and experience and, perhaps more importantly, in his psychology. War, warriors, and weapons were now a normal part of human existence. Also at this time armies produced the prototype of every weapon that was developed for the next three thousand years. Only with the introduction of gunpowder would a new age of weaponry and warfare begin.
A military revolution that eventually produced the age of modern warfare had begun. One of the most important stimuli for this military revolution was the discovery and use of iron. Iron was first employed as a technology of war about 1300 B.C. by the Hittites. Within a hundred years the secret of iron making and cold forging had spread at least to Palestine and Egypt and, perhaps, to Mesopotamia as well. Iron weapons were heated and hammered into shape rather than cast, making them stronger, less brittle, and more reliable that bronze weapons. Within a few hundred years the secret of tempering was discovered, and iron became the basic weapons material for all ancient armies of the period. The importance of iron in the development of ancient warfare lay not in its strength or ability to hold a sharp edge. Iron’s importance rested in the fact that unlike bronze, which required the use of relatively rare tin to manufacture, iron was commonly and widely available almost everywhere. It was also somewhat easier to extract from its carrier ore, and the plentiful supply of this new strategic material made it possible for states to produce enormous quantities of reliable weapons cheaply. This fact made the weapons explosion possible. No longer was it only the major powers that could afford enough weapons to equip a large military force. Now almost any state could do it. The result was a dramatic increase in the frequency of war.
A SHORT HISTORY OF WAR The Evolution of Warfare and Weapons, Richard A. Gabriel and Karen S. Metz, 1992
The convergence of robotics and advanced weaponry took another inevitable step forward with a successful live fire demonstration of several armed robots at Fort Benning Georgia that was covered by Computerworld last week. While armed robots have been tested before, these bots are notable for the accuracy of fire and their apparent readiness for combat. These aren’t science fiction or exotic prototypes, but realistic extension and modifications of existing robotic platforms.
The robots, including the HDT Protector shown above, fired at targets 150 meters out. However the effective range of the weapon is 1800 meters. Moreover, the robot can be remotely operated from over 3000 meters away giving a controlling infantry unit an effective radius of about 5000 meters. However, most humans are not very accurate shots at 1500m or more. Enter another interesting military technology related video that made the rounds this week, Austin’s TrackingPoint “smart gun”. The demonstration video shows how this technology allows the gun operator to have essentially “tap and kill” capability where the gun software calculates the correct targeting parameters and fires itself. The eventual evolution and convergence of the two ideas is a mobile remote robotics platform which will employ small arms more effectively than a human soldier which can be remotely controlled by a human operator far away from the battlefield.
A variety of armed robots with varying levels of autonomy are going to appear on the battlefield in the near term and they will become an integral part of the networked battlefield and battlespace. Although the armed robots demonstrated at Fort Benning all require remote operator control to fire, a networked command and control platform linked with armed robots fundamentally enables autonomous operation of combat systems based on only higher echelon signals.
Apart from light arms, military ground robots can also carry missiles, mortars, and other delivery systems depending on the size of the robotic platform and other factors. The robots will not only include small platforms to aid the infantry and employ small arms, but teleoperated armor and air power as well. Perhaps in the second half of this century, the first fully robotic war will be fought.
Initially ground based robots will be teleoperated over short distances, but longer distance control is possible as demonstrated in the Army’s Long Distance Teleoperation research. A combat robot certainly can be controlled from dozens of kilometers away or even from the other side of the globe using existing technologies. It further seems entirely possible that robots might be altered to enable fully or semi-autonomous battlefield operations at a later time. In the following very interesting video segment, a contractor discusses issues of autonomy, trust, and battlefield use of robots at the Fort Benning demonstrations.
Importantly crude military robots are not that hard or expensive to make. The smart gun sells for $27,500 and a military robot might cost upwards of 200,000. But this compares favorably to the price of a deployed U.S. soldier, more than $850,000 a year. Organizations such as the Libyan Rebels have built their own robots and we can expect many medium sized nation states to build or buy robotic systems in the coming decades. Military drones and robots are hot.
A sophisticated homebrewer could make a pretty deadly teleoperated mobile weapons platform for less than the price of a car. However, for the serious enthusiast the Kuratas robot, the ultimate in Japanese giant robot technology, is the only way to go.
A crude platform could of course be constructed for far less by using a hobby “combat robot” or by a variety of motivated homebrew robot builders and machinists. In fact some DIY weapon designers have already built armed robots for home defense and famously for shooting pigs over the Internet.
While teleoperation and telerobotics obviously have positive uses, the near term viability of low cost military robots is a potentially dangerous and destabilizing development. Various organizations from nations states to terrorist groups or just motivated individuals can build dangerous teleoperated devices. Moreover, it seems that attempts to limit the proliferation of combat robots of various types and models is going to be nearly impossible. Already modestly sophisticated groups can build robots; these systems do not entail particularly exotic technologies and therefore deadly robots are likely to be widely available. Actual combat performance might vary quite a bit of course; we wouldn’t expect a homebrew pig killing robot to defeat a real military system mano-a-mano.
References:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9243120/U.S._Army_evaluates_self_driving_machine_gun_toting_robots http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.05/robots.html
http://www.gizmag.com/long-distance-tele-operation-of-ugvs/19423/
http://www.armedforces-int.com/news/ldto-system-allows-long-range-ugv-control.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Fire_(mortar) http://www.dtic.mil/ndia/2004armaments/DayII/SessionII/07Lindsey_Dragon_Fire_II.pdf
http://www.instructables.com/id/Combat-Robotics-Tutorial/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_combat
http://www.fastcocreate.com/1682478/how-to-build-a-bot-army-inside-the-robot-combat-league
http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/02/28/one-soldier-one-year-850000-and-rising/
http://defensetech.org/2011/06/14/libyan-rebels-diy-weapons-factory-robots-and-all/
http://kotaku.com/5736244/it-is-illegal-to-shoot-pigs-over-the-internet-with-robot-shotguns http://bionics.soe.ucsc.edu/publications/CP_31.pdf
original article found here
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