Where is Sara Conner?

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Discovery had some future warrior shows on a week or three ago, they had three robots armed with I believe M249s. They were ROV, running on treads, but they seem like first step or rather first gen combat robots to me.

That would be the SWORDS robot, developed by the local mad scientists of the Armaments Research Development & Engineering Command here at Picatinny Arsenal.

Neat stuff, but in my personal and professional (military/engineering) opinion, armed robots are a long way from prime time. There are just too many issues associated with clearance of fire, positive ID, confirmation of safety status, spoofing/jamming/hacking, and so on to work out -- though we'll eventually work through all of those items with enough study(hopefully by about 2012, when the armed robots that are part of the Army's Future Combat Systems are supposed to be fielded).

I was personally involved in a minor mishap with a SWORDS. I was at a live fire SWORDS demonstration at an NDIA convention in Albuquerque this year. I standing back in the crowd, waitig for the robot to move into my field of view, when the people infront of me started backing up. I assumed they were moving to get a better view -- until they started running. Turns out the crew had lost control of SWORDS; it wasn't responding to commands and was traversing on to the crowd. Luckily the manual safety on the weapon was still engaged, or the robot could very easily have mown down a bunch of folks -- the weapon was locked & loaded with a full box of ammunition. No harm done in the end (minus a few folks who got dirty diving for cover), but the SWORDS did get pulled from the range. I never did hear what the bug was.