Will We Ever See The Army Use Military Robotics?

War is always tragic and the loss of human life is always unbearable. Yet wars are also, sadly, a part of modern life. Could robots be used by the army to limit the loss of life? Military Robotics are becoming a reality and are no longer confined to the imagination and to fiction or comic books. You might be surprised just how close we are.

Insect-like Robots On The Battle Field

In April 2003 the US commissioned 120 army robots which would be used in the field of mine recovery. Removing mines is a very difficult and obviously dangerous job.

It would be much preferable to lose a bit of machinery (sorry Robots!) than a human life. Military robotics don't necessarily mean sci-fi killing machines. They could be used for this and other dangerous tasks.

These insect like creations will use what's called swarm technology. The robots will work a bit like worker ants, interacting and working together to achieve their objectives.

Project Alpha - creating army soldiers

Then there's Project Alpha. This is another military robotics project which this time aims to create what the army call tactical autonomous combatants. These guys will do a lot of the extremely dangerous grunt work. And will use a combination of complex robot engineering along with equally sophisticated artificial intelligence.

Think something like that is a long way into the future? It's highly likely that we could see them in service in our lifetimes.

Problems Facing Military Robotics

It's all very well getting a robot to work in the clean confines of a laboratory. But the outdoors poses huge problems for robots, as it does for ordinary soldiers. One thing that any tactical army robot will need to make use of will be complicated environment sensing. We're talking some seriously advanced military robotics here.

Creating a robot to work in the water, or even in the air is far simpler than creating something that will be able to deal with different terrains, weather conditions, temperatures and the various rigors of nature. We humans have been dealing with those things for millions of years. Military robots will have to learn it from scratch.