Building Robot Soldiers Researchers are rushing to create battlefield robots that can assist humans in combat. June 24 — Last November, an unmanned Predator aircraft flying high over Yemen killed six suspected Al Qaeda terrorists with a Hellfire missile, leaving little more than scorch marks on a desert highway. The mission was nothing less than robotic warfare: a tactical success with zero risk to American personnel. Today, as casualties continue in Iraq, it's hard not to ask the question: when will similar robot warriors relieve our foot soldiers as well? THE SHORT ANSWER: not soon enough. But the longer answer is more intriguing, with a rapidly increasing U.S. military research and development effort into everything from tiny spy robots that can be hurled into enemy buildings for surveillance purposes, to full-size support vehicles that can drive themselves and supply troops in the field There are even “marsupial” battlefield robots under development that could carry smaller robots that would be deployed to enter bunkers or similar structures if the “mother” robot was too big to fit. After years of on-again, off-again funding of advanced robotics, the U.S. defense research establishment is finally putting big, long-term money into military robots. Perhaps the most spectacular example: the upcoming DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) “Grand Challenge”, in March 2004, which will award a $1 million prize to the winning research team. The challenge: create a fully autonomous vehicle, with no human control, that can successfully drive a route from the desert town of Barstow, northeast of Los Angeles, to Las Vegas in less than ten hours. The still-secret route will be both on-road and off-road, but will include no obstacles that a commercial four-wheel-drive pickup truck can't handle. The route will be cleared of all pedestrian and vehicle traffic, and each robot vehicle will have an emergency-stop ability that can be actuated by an accompanying manned safety vehicle. So far, 27 teams have applied for the adventure-and if no one wins in 2004, DARPA plans to hold another Challenge in 2005. Now, besides sounding like a great reality TV show (have the programmers at Fox heard about this yet?), the Challenge is intended to promote research into one of the most fundamental problems facing military robotics: creating machines that are more or less capable of taking care of themselves, only calling out(via radio) when there is a particular need for human guidance An early application of such autonomous vehicles would almost certainly be in military supply lines, potentially reducing the risks encountered, for example, by Pfc. Jessica Lynch’s ambushed maintenance company. Closer to reality is a military robot dubbed “PackBot” being built by Massachusetts-based iRobot. If iRobot sounds familiar, that's because it’s also the company behind the Roomba Intelligent Floor Vac, a flat round autonomous $200 floor vacuum widely seen in mail-order catalogs. Roomba's military big brother. PackBot, doesn't vacuum, but the little treaded wonder can climb stairs, stand upright to negotiate narrow passageways, and even survive a fall from a two story window. PackBot, according to iRobot “was initially designed to enhance the effectiveness of mobile strike forces in urban terrain”, but they're now developing medical version. “Bloodhound” could be sent out onto an active battlefield to provide short-term care for wounded soldiers, without requiring a medic to risk his life. Similar kinds of highly maneuverable robot vehicles could also be used for dangerous advance reconnaissance missions, venturing into enemy territory to send back images and data. Another big potential military application is robot sentries. Cybermotion, a robot company in Roanoke, Virginia, already supplies their robotic warehouse guard CyberGuard to private companies ranging from Bayer to Genentech. In civilian warehouses, the CyberGuard operates under the control of a human (although it can be set to a random, patrol mode) and it carries no weapons. The military is now adapting CyberGuard for more fully autonomous duty, as well as adding the option of “non-lethal” weaponry, such as the PepperBall system that fires pepper-filled plastic balls that break open on contact. Of course, as soon as one begins to talk about non-lethal weaponry, it’s a short jump to lethality. But researchers seem to be in no hurry to arm autonomous robots. It is a big enough challenge simply to build robots that are capable of taking on the simple task of mobility across battlefields or down urban streets. It is likely, for example, that no autonomous vehicle will manage to win the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge and if you can't drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas you probably shouldn’t be trusted with a firearm. However, multiple kinds of robots will undoubtedly be armed with weapons that can be fired on command by remote human operators-that's exactly how the Predator mission in Yemen was executed. During this decade, military robots will probably save lives not by fighting, but by performing some of the more mundane but still hazardous support activities. That will cut casualties right away—only about a third of the servicemen killed in Iraq since May have died in actual fighting. But someday, in some army, robots will bear and fire arms on their own. Science fiction fans may recall that the first of Isaac Asimov's Three Rules of Robotics in his 1950 classic book I , Robot was: “A robot must never harm a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” In the book, that rule was ascribed to Handbook of robotics , 56th Edition, 2058 A.D. Barring a wholesale shift in human behavior; sometime before that the First Rule of Robotics will almost certainly be broken.