Autonomous roving robots are being deployed to guard sensitive installations and national borders – and some of them are armed
Editorial: Robot sentries: a warning from the movies
IT IS nearly dawn, and after 10 hours of patrolling in the wind and rain, the sentry is still alert. Every lock, door and gate at the remote military installation has been checked. Armed, ready and completely fearless, the sentry has senses keen enough to spot an intruder hundreds of metres away, even at night.
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Meeting this brief would be tough even for a highly trained soldier. But this sentry is a robot, and its kind is taking over security duties all over the world.
Unlike bomb-disposal robots, which are operated by remote control, robot sentries are largely autonomous: they patrol unsupervised until they find something that needs human attention. The US military has been working on sentry robots since the 1980s. The big challenge has been to make them recognise and avoid real obstacles while ignoring shadows or dust clouds that might look like solid objects to their sensors.
“The big challenge has been to make robots recognise and avoid real obstacles while ignoring shadows”
Now the technology has reached maturity, and various robots have left the laboratory and are on the lookout for real intruders. This month the Nevada National Security Site, part of the US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), announced that it had deployed three autonomous roving robots built by General Dynamics Robotics Systems of Westminster, Maryland, to guard its radioactive waste and other nuclear materials.
Called the (MDARS), each robot is the size of a small car and can plot its own patrol round, with random variations. It can travel on or off road. Human operators only need to intervene when MDARS alerts them to a potential problem. This allows one operator to look after several robots.
A stack of turrets on top of MDARS houses obstacle-detecting lasers and radar, thermal imaging to detect intruders, and video cameras. If it spots a human, the operator can challenge them through the robot’s loudspeaker and interrogate them via a two-way audio link. MDARS can also be fitted with a high-intensity strobe light to dazzle and disorient intruders, immobilising them until human back-up arrives.
A radio-frequency ID tag reader, similar to those used in warehouses and supermarkets, allows it to check that stored items such as cargo pallets are where they are supposed to be and read the status of RFID-enabled locks.
A non-lethal weapon based on a paintball gun for possible use in MDARS has been developed by the US navy’s . It can be loaded with , or pepper balls that create a cloud of irritant dust on impact. In its current form it will be fired by the robot’s operator, but work is under way to give MDARS the ability to track and engage targets independently.
The Israeli company G-Nius Unmanned Ground Systems is also developing a roving off-road vehicle with a high degree of autonomy, which it calls the . It has visual, infrared and radar sensors, a two-way audio link for interrogating intruders, and can carry an RFID system. It also has sensors capable of spotting hostile fire, and can be fitted with machine guns as well as non-lethal weapons.
Faced with what G-Nius calls “unscheduled events”, Guardium will respond according to preset rules. This might simply mean alerting the operator, but it can also be programmed to return fire if shot at. In 2009, G-Nius’s CEO Erez Peled that the robot has been patrolling Israel’s borders in earnest since March that year.
In South Korea, the Samsung Techwin SGR-1, described by its maker as an “intelligent surveillance and guard robot”, is being tested by the army with a view to deploying it on the border with North Korea. The SGR-1 has visual and infrared sensors that can distinguish intruders from inanimate objects. If an intruder fails to give a password when challenged, it can respond with lethal or non-lethal fire. The SGR-1 is static, but is reportedly working on a mobile version.
The patrolling robots built so far can only operate in known environments that are easy to navigate, but in future we could see them driving themselves along city streets. Google’s Street View project has gathered laser range-finding data covering many cities, and this could be used to build a 3D map a robot could use. This month, Google announced that it has successfully tested a driverless car.
Now that autonomous patrolling robots are trusted by the military to carry out sentry duty, there is likely to be pressure to extend their use into other areas, not least because they can be cheaper than alternative surveillance systems. According to of the NNSA, the MDARS robots are a cheaper way of securing the Nevada National Security Site than installing a network of CCTV cameras.
Whether armed robots roaming our streets will ever be acceptable is another matter. “Autonomous operation and target acquisition is only a very short step away from autonomous killing,” says Noel Sharkey of the University of Sheffield, UK, “and there is no possibility of a machine making discriminative choices.”
