ARMED DRONES ROLLING TO IRAQ

Hunting for gueril­las, han­dling road­side bombs, crawl­ing across the caves and crum­bling towns of Afghanistan and Iraq — all of that was just a start.
Now, the U.S. Army’s squad of robotic vehi­cles is being prepped for a new set of assign­ments. And this time, they’ll be car­ry­ing guns.
As soon as March or April, eigh­teen Talon robots armed with auto­matic weapons are sched­uled to report for duty in Iraq, as part of the Army’s Stryker Brigade.
Around the same time, the first pro­to­types of a new, unmanned ambu­lance should be ready for the Army to start test­ing. In a war­ren of hangar-​​sized hotel ball­rooms in Orlando, Florida, mil­i­tary engi­neers this week at the Army Science Conference showed off their next gen­er­a­tion of robots, as they got the machines ready for the war­zone.
“Putting some­thing like this into the field, we’re about to start some­thing that’s never been done before,” said Staff Sergeant Santiago Tordillos, wav­ing to the black, two-​​and-​​a-​​half foot tall robot rolling around the car­peted floor on twin treads, an M249 machine gun cra­dled into its mechan­i­cal grip.
My Wired News arti­cle has details.
THERE’S MORE. Hmmm. This News​.com story looks just a lit­tle famil­iar.
AND MORE: Speaking of unmanned guns, reader SL points us to these pic­tures of the South Korean army using remote-​​controlled machine gun tur­rets in Iraq.

December 1st, 2004 | Drones | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.