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Exterminate! Exterminate!When a Thai engineering professor announced that his students had created the "world's first armed robot guard," controllable via the Internet, the global scientific community shuddered in unison. Its inventors, however, swear it's a useful security device. Would the robot ever be sold commercially?September 12, 2000
The robot--dubbed "Roboguard" by the Thai
press--is designed to take the place of human security guards in restricted
areas such as banks and top secret military zones. Equipped with a video
camera, Roboguard can track the movements of intruders using a built-in
infrared sensor. But locating intruders isn't the trick up this robot's
metallic sleeve. Roboguard, you see, is packing heat. The robot comes equipped
with a gun, which can be manually aimed and fired via the Internet or Local
Area Network (LAN). Understandably, this feature is attracting the most
attention.
Roboguard's inventor, Dr. Pitikhate Sooraksa of King Mongkut's Institute
of Technology in Bangkok, says his invention is incapable of violating
robotics-visionary Isaac
Asimov's three laws of robotics. One of the laws states that robots
must never injure human beings. "Some people are saying that the Roboguard
can think for itself and shoot whenever it wants, but that is simply not
the case," Pitikhate says. "We have taken care to build the robot so it
cannot fire on its own."
Dr. Pitikhate can't understand the fuss, and points out that the U.S.
military has been developing sentry robots for many years, some of which
have lethal capabilities. "We've used tele-robotic technology that already
exists," he says. "All we did was add a pistol and a camera, as well as
the ability to connect it to a network."
Military sentry robots primarily watch over areas like warehouses and
sound an alarm when they detect something wrong, like an intruder or a
fire. Most military "robots" used in combat consist of computer chips with
navigation instructions, for instance, in smart missiles. These robots
always have a human in the loop who makes the decision to fire. "It has
long been the policy of the U.S. military not to trust robots with weapons,"
says Chuck Thorpe, acting director of the Robotics
Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.
It's Roboguard's link to the Internet or a Local Area Network (LAN)
that raises scientists' suspicions. For instance, what happens if network
congestion occurs at the precise moment that Roboguard is locking onto
its target? "Although the command to fire is made up of very few bytes
[which means that it travels across the network quickly], the tests we
did using the Internet were purely experimental," says Dr. Pitikhate. "If
Roboguard were to be used in an area such as a bank vault or a military
installation, it would require a LAN [to overcome the time delay]."
Dr. Pitikhate never expected that the project would come under such
intense scrutiny. "The goal of the Roboguard project was to challenge my
students and help them become skilled engineers," he says. "This was a
scientific experiment that we never intended to market commercially."
He feels that some of the negative media attention is unwarranted. "These
types of robots are a necessary evil for the defense industry," he opines.
"If people are trying to get into your top secret places in order to destroy
whatever's in there, should you just open the door and let them in?" Kevin McLaughlin(kmclaughlin@business2.com)is
a reporter for Business2.com
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Content copyright © 2000 Imagine Media Inc. Find this article at: http://www.business2.com/content/channels/technology/2000/09/12/18571 |