In a hidden testing ground somewhere on the outskirts of Boston,
Massachusetts, machines billed as the future of warfare are being put
through their paces. Inside the compound — accessed after rigorous security
checks — are no-go areas, forbidden laboratories and stark warnings not to
touch the equipment.
So it’s a surprise to come face to face with the latest military hardware and
discover that it’s unarmed. The small unmanned ground vehicle (SUGV), with
its tracked wheels and articulated sensor head, looks more like Wall-E, the
cute robot in Disney’s animated film of the same name, than the homicidal
machines from the Terminator films.
The company that builds them is called iRobot, and it is America’s biggest
manufacturer of military robots. I am here to put some of its latest
inventions through their paces. And despite the formality of the
surroundings, I can’t help having fun: directing the 30lb SUGV with a video
game-style wireless controller is like playing with the world’s best
remote-control toy. A tap on a joystick and it darts forward instantly,
blasting up slopes, rattling over rocks and even, with the aid of rotating
flippers, climbing stairs. All the while, on-board cameras feed back live
video to a pin-sharp head-up display, allowing me to zoom in with a 300x
telephoto lens, flip into night vision or direct a laser range-finder onto a
distant target.
The game is deadly serious, however. Robert Gates, the US defence secretary,
recently announced that SUGVs would form a key part of the military’s
multi-billion-dollar Future Combat Systems modernisation programme,
deploying to every brigade in the army. They will be used for everything
from searching hostile buildings and caves to disarming bombs. The SUGV’s
predecessor, the PackBot, has been in Afghanistan since 2002 and Iraq since
2003. The US army claims it has disarmed more than 10,000 improvised
explosive devices.
IRobot is at the vanguard of a drive towards a remote battlefield, where
humans are replaced with autonomous and semi-autonomous drones and robots.
According to PW Singer, an American defence analyst and author of Wired for
War, the number of unmanned systems on the ground in Iraq has gone from zero
to 12,000 over the past five years. He argues that this is only the start
and that military officers acknowledge new prototypes will soon make human
fighter pilots obsolete, while the Pentagon is developing insect-sized
robots to carry out reconnaissance work.
Suddenly companies such as iRobot are finding themselves in hot demand. It has
already delivered 2,400 PackBots, which cost $100,000 (£63,000) each, to the
US army and about two dozen to the Ministry of Defence in Britain. It was
founded by engineers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Nasa’s Jet
Propulsion Laboratory and Disney.
Less than 10 years ago, iRobot was struggling to find a market for such
products as My Real Baby, an animatronic infant that could move its eyes and
lips and gurgle. Unfortunately, it looked less like a real baby than a
creepy newborn Arnold Schwarzenegger covered in plastic, and did not sell
well. Then there were the toys such as the robot dinosaur, the robot tractor
and the robotic webcam that could follow you around a room. None took off
until the company came up with the Roomba, a robot vacuum cleaner that
accounts for around half the global home robotics market. It is the demand
for warrior robots, however, that has really catapulted the company into the
big time.
Both the PackBot and SUGV require human operators today, but iRobot plans to
upgrade their hardware and software in the future to give them some
self-sufficiency. “Real autonomous robots as Hollywood views them are still
30 years or 40 years into the future,” says Joe Dyer, president of iRobot’s
military robotics. “When we talk about autonomy, we’re talking about a
machine that can navigate without continuous operation, operate tracks and
arms without bumping into itself, and that, if you lose communications, will
go back to where it could talk the last time.”
Even if its robots are not yet intelligent, they are gaining other abilities.
Chris Jones, iRobot’s research programme manager, reveals details of a
shape-shifting spy robot that could have been inspired by the liquid metal
cyborg from Terminator 2. “We’re building robots that don’t have motors,
wheels or anything rigid in them. They don’t even have batteries, they run
on chemical power,” he says. “They’re made of new materials called
dielectric elastomers, which are extremely flexible and can change shape by
applying electric or magnetic fields. Ultimately, we will build a robot that
is completely squishy and that can squeeze through a hole the size of a 10
pence piece.”
Experts in everything from origami and flexible electronics to the mathematics
of Venus fly trap movement are working on the project, and Jones expects to
have a working, slithering prototype within a year. “We’ve already had
sub-systems that we’ve shown to move. Now we’re looking at how to pull it
all together.”
If providing surveillance and saving soldiers’ lives were all that military
robots were doing, it would be easy to dismiss Hollywood’s merciless
kill-bots as mere science fiction. However, the PackBot is a modular system,
in which cameras can be augmented with a gripper, sensors for chemical
weapons or a Taser X26 stun weapon. The next generation of iRobot’s
machines, the Warrior, will go further still. This larger (285lb) robot will
be able to travel over rough terrain at 9.5mph, drag a fully laden soldier
and sport a multi-barrel Firestorm electronic gun shooting high-explosive
rounds.
The combination of high firepower and low intellect sounds sinister but it
doesn’t worry some experts, such as Patrick Lin, professor of robotic ethics
at California Polytechnic State University. “Robots don’t inherently have
emotions, and can’t act out of hate, anger or fear,” he says. “We don’t want
robots to think for themselves. If they just follow orders and remain within
rules of engagement they would do a better job than people in this narrow,
military context.”
Experiments with autonomous armed robots — machines that are capable of
choosing and engaging targets without human control — have not always gone
well. In South Africa in 2007 a robotic anti-aircraft gun began firing at
random during an exercise, killing nine soldiers and wounding 11 more. Then,
last year in Iraq, the US army cancelled plans to deploy machinegun-equipped
Talon Swords robots, with the manufacturer citing unexplained “technical
issues”.
Despite this, the rush to arm androids is speeding up. The Pentagon has at
least four programmes involving development of armed, autonomous robots
including one that proposes using a team of cyborgs to track down and
capture enemy personnel. More than 40 countries, including China, Russia,
Pakistan and Iran, are also developing military robots, and few are
squeamish about putting metal fingers on triggers. At least two countries,
South Korea and Israel, have already deployed sentry robots along their
borders.
“Eventually, these weapons will proliferate,” says Lin. “Our enemies will also
have robots. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.”
While the most complex and capable robots, such as the Warrior, are very
expensive — around $300,000 (£189,000) each — smaller, simpler robots can be
almost as dangerous, while being much cheaper to construct.
At iRobot, I am shown a tiny tracked robot, code-named Ember, weighing just
1lb and costing so little to make that it is virtually disposable.
Ember moves at walking pace, can right itself when it is turned over and is
controlled by a simple touchscreen application on an Apple iPhone.
IRobot’s version is designed to boost radio communications and capture video
footage but it does not take much imagination to envisage similar devices
packing various weapons and explosives. Suddenly, the PackBots and SUGVs
zipping around iRobot’s assault course seem a little less fun and a little
more dangerous.
At least iRobot’s Joe Dyer does have a few pointers in case you should ever
find yourself facing a rogue robot: “It’s not unlike us: if you hit the
right place, you kill it but there are other places where it’ll keep on
working.”
And where might those right places be? “I could tell you,” he says. “But then
I’d have to have one of my robots kill you.”
