I mean, yeah. I Did A Thing did a video on exactly this a year or so back. His setup was a complete shitshow as they had to change robo-dogs at the last second (because Michael Reeves and OfflineTV didn’t want to get sued by Boston Dynamics) but the principle was sound.
But also? You are never going to replace a well trained soldier with this. Even with a proper gimbal mount, you aren’t doing rapid precise shots.
But also… you don’t need to. The advantage to this is to have a relatively low cost platform to handle suppressive fire or fire an anti-tank shot or whatever. Something where you would otherwise be risking a human being.
I mean… that is another I Did A Thing video (the knife missile is Backyard/Backdoor Scientist). Well, I Did A Thing, Michael Reeves, random ass kids, etc.
Gun+Computer Vision = Autonomous Sentry Turret. Reeves and Aleks made things “harder” by trying to specifically identify faces. But it doesn’t take much to realize that shooting at anything identified as a human approaching on an active battlefield is a LOT easier. And will likely be necessary as more and more “C4 duct taped to a drone” attacks are used against airfields and the like.
Israel is already assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists with autonomous/remote-controlled gun platforms. The last one I’ve heard of apparently was able to use facial recognition and shoot the scientist in his car sparing the other passengers.
Next to that, putting the platform on a Spot seems almost trivial. Maybe one day they’ll be able to airdrop a bot, have it walk kilometers across a forest, and place itself in a position to snipe someone marked for death by one State or another.
Automation is the big deal. Drones have cameras so humans can make a (hopefully) informed disision to strike or not. When (read; now) the drone doesn’t need a camera because it can make the call without a human in the loop, we have removed a vital bottleneck.
The only thing that stopped WWI from being total war is that when we wipped out an entire generation, we needed time to grow more troops. If autonomous weapons being manufactured autonomously by autonomously constructed factories… whoever controled the drones could of conquered the world.
No, that assumes that resources and energy are unlimited. This is the main problem with any “grey goo” scenario.
And it wasn’t people being killed that stopped WW2. People are killed in every war. The defensive weaponry was more powerful than the offensive weaponry. Machine guns were only used on defense because they were heavy. Also, artillery was not mechanized so it was hard to move everything forward quickly.
Anyone still remembers when they said they would never use dog robots for weapon/war purposes? I do. Things always age like milk and it’s unsurprising.
Boston Dynamics said that, and they have stuck to that commitment. IIRC it’s even in the contract when you buy a robot from them that you will not equip it with a weapon.
This article is about Ghost Robotics, which has never made such a commitment. They are known to supply gun-equipped robots to governments at all levels.
Well, yeah. That was the goal of creating all of these.
Hell, Boston Dynamics was originally funded heavily by DARPA. BigDog, AlphaDog, LittleDog, and LS3 were all funded by DARPA and designed for military use.
Only thing shocking about this is that it took this long. Any drone capable of carrying a weapon was going to get one. I mean, look at Ukraine right now. Consumer drones with soda bottle improvised explosives and cardboard drones. I can see a future where most warfare is drone vs drone, to see who can hit the other's supply lines / storage first.
The way Russia's turtling with illegal mines, drones are basically one of the only ways to attack without taking massive losses while also moving slowly and being sitting ducks for artillery.
The future will never be about drone vs drone, as no one cares about the drones. They have to hit where it hurts, which is human life.
Best case scenario, wars will be fought over drone command centres. Much more probably drones will be used to increase civilian suffering to end the wars.
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