Friday, December 9, 2016

And You Thought You Saw The Last of The Terminator. He's Back - As A SWAT-Bot!


So, I've been watching Westworld and it seems like killer robots are becoming a thing again. There are some really cool things with the bot featured in this slick ad:
  • It's seemingly quiet. For obvious reasons.
  • They went the fashionable "combat black" look. It's mandatory for anything being called "covert" these days. (snark)
  • It has loads of cameras. One of the primary purposes of the bot is to give human operators tactical situational awareness. The field of view seems to be okay and has what appears to be some PTZ stuff going on, though the cameras appear to be very stationary. If it relies on the vehicle to move the camera, then I'm curious whether that compromises noise discipline.
  • It comes with a Glock. Yeah. It's "G'd up from da floor up". My bad - that's street vernacular for "It has a working gun that can kill people". That said, I'm curious if the vehicle has a stabilizer to compensate for recoil. Also, where does the "brass" go? Surely, it's not optimal to have it eject in a way that it could lodge between the gun and the bot chassis.
My overall complaints about the bot:
  • It looks great in a video which means it will perform like crap once it gets deployed.
  • I need to see more Army-proofing. Ahem! How long before crazy G.I.s break it on its first run? Trust me - you need to be asking this question.
  • Humans have been doing a bang-up job of clearing rooms thus far without bots. Not sure how this helps in real world tactical environments. Yeah, shooters may not have to get too close to make the hard shots but....What happens when your suspect sees this thing and decides you're trying to make entry and kills hostages preemptively before you do?
  • Finally, I worry about the trial and error part of figuring out its limitations in the real world. An EOD bot is easy to square away because testing and training go hand-in-hand especially in a semi-controlled environment. This bot's armament would need to be tested along with its operators under conditions that mirror the real world both in risk and realism. In other words, let's see it clear a "trap house" with a barricaded homicidal subject armed with an AK-47 and has kids as potential hostages. We tend to be very "meh" about collateral damage (civilian deaths) in combat zones during drone strikes - I have a feeling we'd feel differently about a bot who killed a hostage due to operator error or mechanical failure. Thankfully, it's under human-control. Imagine what it can do if given analytics.

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