Robotic Nation Evidence

The previous post on humanoid police robots prompted a friend to send in this article on fully armed military robots: Gladiator robot looks to join Marine Corps.





From this article:

The Gladiator is loaded with all sorts of gadgets and weaponry, including day and night cameras, a chemical detection system, Light Vehicle Obscuration Smoke System, and is mounted with either M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, the M240G Medium Machine Gun, 9 mm Uzi or an Anti-Personnel/Obstacle Breaching System (APOBS).

From this article:

The target cost for the Gladiator is $150,000, which Larry Hennebeck of the Unmanned Ground Vehicles Joint Project Office said is a big departure from million-dollar Army prototype attack systems.

That is a very low price point -- not much different from the annual cost of a soldier.

The price will fall, and advancing computer and vision technology will make the Gladiator and its descendents more and more autonomous. At first it will take one soldier to operate each Gladiator. Then a soldier will be able to operate two or three simultaneously. Then a soldier will be able to operate a squad of 20 of them, and so on. In 20 years, imagine thousands of gladiators, instead of soldiers, deploying on the battlefield. Or deploying to police a U.S. city.