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Pentagon Developing Autonomous Humanoid Robots To Perform Evacuation Operations

Thursday, August 16, 2012 14:29DARPA enlists makers of “BigDog” to construct machines that can think for themselves

Steve Watson Infowars.com Aug 16, 2012

The Department of Defense has awarded a lucrative contract to an engineering and robotics design company to develop and build humanoid robots that can act intelligently without supervision.

Boston Dynamics Inc. has been contracted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the agency responsible for the development of new technologies for use by the military, in a deal worth $10.9 million.

The DoD announced Tuesday that “The robotic platforms will be humanoid, consisting of two legs, a torso, two arms with hands, a sensor head and on board computing.”

DARPA’s website says that the robots will help “conduct humanitarian, disaster relief and related operations.”

“The plan identifies requirements to extend aid to victims of natural or man-made disasters and conduct evacuation operations.” reads the brief, first released in April as part of DARPA’s ‘Robotics Challenge’.

The robots will operate with “supervised autonomy”, according to DARPA, and will be able to act intelligently by themselves, making their own decisions if and when direct supervision is not possible.

The Pentagon also envisions that the robots will be able to use basic and diverse “tools”.

While the Pentagon says the robots are for “humanitarian” missions, one cannot avoid thinking of the propensity to adapt this kind of military style technology for other more aggressive purposes.

Indeed, the Pentagon has, in the past, issued a request to contractors to develop teams of robots that can search for, detect and track “non-cooperative” humans in “pursuit/evasion scenarios”.

Issued in 2008, the request, called for a “Multi-Robot Pursuit System” to be operated by one person.

The proposal described the need to

“…develop a software/hardware suit that would enable a multi-robot team, together with a human operator, to search for and detect a non-cooperative human subject.

The main research task will involve determining the movements of the robot team through the environment to maximize the opportunity to find the subject, while minimizing the chances of missing the subject. If the operator is an active member of the search team, the software should minimize the chance that the operator may encounter the subject.”

It is seemingly important to the Pentagon that the operator should not have to come into contact with the person being chased down by the machines.

The description continues:

“The software should maintain awareness of line-of-sight, as well as communication and sensor limits. It will be necessary to determine an appropriate sensor suite that can reliably detect human presence and is suitable for implementation on small robotic platforms.”

Paul Marks at The New Scientist pointed out such proposals are somewhat concerning, because they inevitably will be adapted for domestic purposes such as crowd control.

“…how long before we see packs of droids hunting down pesky demonstrators with paralysing weapons? Or could the packs even be lethally armed?” Marks asks.

Read more @ http://www.infowars.com/pentagon-developing-autonomous-humanoid-robots-to-perform-evacuation-operations/

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