Army Terminators Walk Like Men

WIRED Danger Room | 21 May, 2009

Round four of mankind’s epic battle against the walking, talking, killer machines starts tonight with the opening of Terminator Salvation. But humanoid robots aren’t confined to the movies. Turns out the U.S. military is backing research into robots that act like people, as well.

Today, the American armed forces’ main ground robots, the Foster-Miller Talon and iRobot’s Packbot, look like boxes with caterpillar tracks. It’s a nice, stable design. And it works well — which is why the military has sent thousands of ‘em over to Afghanistan and Iraq.

But these robots don’t easily fit into a world that we humans have constructed for creatures that operate like us. Door handles only work if you have something like a hand — and it has to be at the right height, too. Wheels and tracks get stuck on obstacles that legs just jump over. So it makes sense, sometimes, to shape a machine like a man.

One of the American military’s leading humanoid robots is Petman. Its job will be to testing chemical protection clothing for the U.S. Army. Petman is being built by Boston Dynamics, famous for its alarmingly lifelike BigDog robotic pack mule. Unlike earlier suit-testing robots, which needed external support, Petman will stand — and walk — on his own two feet.

“Petman will balance itself and move freely; walking, crawling and doing a variety of suit-stressing calisthenics during exposure to chemical warfare agents,” the company promises. “Petman will also simulate human physiology within the protective suit by controlling temperature, humidity and sweating when necessary, all to provide realistic test conditions. ”

A sweating robot? I had a flashback to the first Terminator movie:

“The 600 series had rubber skin. We spotted them easy. These are new. They look human. Sweat, bad breath, everything….”

Petman needs to precisely simulate human movement, and the makers say it will be “the first anthropomorphic robot that moves dynamically like a real person, with natural, agile movement.” The mecha-man is described as “BigDog’s Big Brother.” In fact, his bottom half is simply a pair of BigDog legs.

The program will consist of 13 months of design and 17 months of construction. The finished product being delivered in 2011. (Will they have to deliver Petman, or will they just give him the address and send him off?)

Meanwhile, Bucknell University researchers have received a $1.2 million grant for research and development of military robots, including a 5-foot-tall bipedal walker.

“It would move over curbs, up stairs and around rubble,” says Keith Buffinton, professor of mechanical engineering. “It could be used for surveillance and to gather information in areas you would not want to risk human life.”

The machine is already taking its first steps and is said to be better at balancing than a human. Professor Steven Shooter says they’ll be able to give the robot a head (complete with cameras) and “arm-like devices to assist with balancing.”

It’s unlikely that killer robots are walking among us just yet. But in a few years someone with a rather mechanical gait who refuses to take off his motorcycle helmet may not be quite what he seem.

Bonus feature… and spoiler alert…

There are new non-human Terminators in the new movie as well, including a variety of riderless motorbikes called Moto-Terminators. Once again, science fiction is only just ahead of science fact.

In 2005, one of the competitors in Darpa’s Grand Challenge for robot vehicles was an unmanned motor bike called Ghost Rider.

This was based on a 90-cc dirt bike outfitted with sensors, gyros for steering and video cameras for eyes. The designer, Anthony Levandowski of University of California, Berkeley, said that the two-wheel layout made it more maneuverable than the big Jeeps and trucks fielded by other competitors. It also as kept costs down. The whole thing cost just $150,000, which puts it in the bargain basement for military robotics.

An article in Berkeley Engineering’s newsletter later said that Levandowski “hopes to keep Ghostrider alive by continuing to refine its subsystems, like the obstacle avoidance software, for potential use in unmanned scouting and surveillance operations.”

Of course unmanned craft like the Predator also started out on scouting and surveillance duty — before someone decided to arm them.

US forces want man-hunting robot wolfpacks

This is so cool I don’t mind if it’s true and I’m murdered in my sleep by legion of robot hunters

The Register | October 24, 2008

Trouser-moisteningly terrifying news broke this week, as it emerged that sinister forces within the US military are looking to develop a remorseless robotic wolfpack capable of hunting down “a non-cooperative human subject” in “an indoor environment”.

Yes, it’s true – last month, crazed Pentagon brainiacs asked contractors to develop a “Multi-Robot Pursuit System”, to consist of:A software and sensor package to enable a team of robots to search for and detect human presence in an indoor environment…

Operator control units are available that allow semi-autonomous map-based control of a team of robots … There has also been significant research in the game theory community involving pursuit/evasion scenarios. This topic seeks to merge these research areas and develop a software/hardware suite that would enable a multi-robot team, together with a human operator, to search for and detect a non-cooperative human subject.

It will be necessary to determine an appropriate sensor suite that can reliably detect human presence and is suitable for implementation on small robotic platforms.

Typical robots for this type of activity are expected to weigh less than 100 Kg and the team would have three to five robots.

Not only will the skies of tomorrow be black with automated armadas of Reaper slay-planes, Fire Scout unmanned kill-choppers and possible crewless raygun cyber bombers; not only will thousands of years of human civilisation rapidly be reduced to smoking rubble; but even the option of cowering like a hunted beast in a cellar, sewer or tumbled monument has now been snatched away. Those hoping to survive for years after the machine uprising, subsisting on refuse and scuttling rat-like through the ruins until loneliness and horror finally bring merciful insanity and death, have been balked. Soulless squads of steel stormtrooper assassins will prowl the shattered cities of humanity like hunting velociraptor packs, sniffing out and snuffing the cowering remnant meatsacks, until a lifeless Pax Robotica rules the entire Earth unchallenged.

That’s surely the view being taken by two of Britain’s top technofear profs, asked (http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2008/10/packs-of-robots-will-hunt-down.html?DCMP=ILC-hmts&nsref=specrt13_head_Pack%20hunting%20robots) to comment on the droid by renowned peacenik tech publication New Scientist.

Here’s Steve Wright of Leeds Metropolitan University:

“What we have here are the beginnings of something designed to enable robots to hunt down humans like a pack of dogs … they will become autonomous and become armed.

“We can also expect … sensors which detect human breath and the radio waves associated with a human heart beat. These are technologies already developed.”

Wright has also predicted the coming of “a modern techno-politics” deploying “machine operatives” and “self-deciding automated sentinels” armed with a terrifying sci-fi panoply of microwave rayguns, pulse lasers, tranq bombs, plasma-lightning mob blasters, “vortex energy rings” and sonic beam weapons. Honest: pdf (http://praxis.leedsmet.ac.uk/praxis/documents/Steve_violent_peacekeeping.pdf), p12-13.

Needless to say, Wright’s views are echoed by our old friend Noel Sharkey – the man who famously flagged up the threat of droid security troopers blasting little girls who try to share ice-creams with them (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/aug/18/comment.military), who has warned of the deadly robot terrorist threat (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/27/sharkey_robot_terrorists/), and who endorses (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/17/robot_defence_weaponry_caper/) bogus robot-buster weaponry companies.

“There will be a robot force under command of a single soldier with potentially dire consequences for innocents around the corner,” says Sharkey, speaking of the new droid doorkicker plans.

Hmm. Except, you know, actually the consequences for innocents running into a well-equipped Western military are already much more deadly than this. At the moment, due to a huge shortage of common-or-garden men with guns, such forces all too frequently deal with uncooperative humans in indoor environments by blowing up the entire building or even neighbourhood.

Even where a squad of troops can be found to clear a house, this is extremely dangerous work for the team doing the job. As a result, they quite often shoot people they shouldn’t, tending to value speed over correctness when making decisions.

Sure, robot house-clearers (if armed) could make mistakes and kill innocents. But humans already do that anyway. Easing the fear/kneejerk factor for the human soldier operator – the Multi-Robot Pursuit System software “should minimize the chance that the operator may encounter the subject” – might actually reduce the number of errors, not increase it.

And the fact that one soldier can clear a house could mean that more houses will cleared by soldiers, rather than by dropping thousand-pounders on them. The huge majority of innocents killed in all recent wars have been the victims of heavy ordnance and/or landmines, typically airdropped – not any kind of weapon suitable for soldiers or “pursuit system” ground robots.

My god – could it be – sometimes technology makes things better than they were before? No, no. Sorry. Heresy. Ahem.

Still, the opponents of the machine rebellion may not need to tool up with an electropulse rifle and barricade ourselves into the septic tank* just yet. Today’s ground robots have absolutely zero chance of outmanoeuvring or outshooting human beings inside a building; in a gunfight, the fleshies will emerge victorious.

That’s why this programme is not, as prof Sharkey says, part of the US army’s serious robot legion plan – the Future Combat Systems initiative. Rather, it is being run by the Small Business Innovation Research effort, which is designed to make sure that SMEs get a snuffle at the mighty federal pork barrel now and then. This is a job-creation effort for humans, not a serious tech push.

D’oh! What am I saying? Normal service will now resume:

Holy crap! The robots are coming! They’re in the bunker! Cutting through the door! Take that, you metal swine! Hah, they don’t care for the taste of high-power microwave pulse retribution. Damn – electropulse gun empty – bacofoil cranial paralysis-ray shield out of juice! Tin fucker’s got me by the leg! Just leave me and save yourselves! No, no – not the vortex energy ring! Aiee!

And so forth. ®

*The smell should mask our bad breath from the droid smellware, and the liquid excrement ought to stifle our heartbeat radio signature.

Wireless contact lenses transmit computer images and data directly into the eyes

High-tech Terminator vision may be possible with the bionic lens

Telegraph | Jan 27, 2008

Contact lenses with Terminator vision

By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent

An electronic contact lens has been developed that will enable maps and videos to be beamed before the wearer’s eyes.

The bionic lens has microscopic circuits fixed to a flexible plastic. The scientists who created the device say the lenses could eventually provide computer-aided vision similar to that of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s robotic character in the Terminator films.

Drivers and pilots would have essential information – their speed and direction, for example – superimposed in front of their eyes, in a massive advance on the kind of “wearable displays” now available, which are spectacles that have images displayed on the lenses.

A prototype of the lens has been built, with light-emitting diodes – LEDs – embedded in it to flash up information. Its built-in antenna will use wireless technology, similar to that used in the home, to beam information to the lens, allowing wearers to surf the internet without taking their eyes off the world around them.

Babak Parviz, the electrical engineer behind the project at the University of Washington, said: “We have demonstrated some of the key technologies required to make a sophisticated functional contact lens. We hope to hook up a wireless link… for updating images and reporting the state of the lens.”

Microscopic electrical circuits link up the LEDs and the antenna harvests energy from radio waves to power the lens. Holes which are each 1,000 times thinner than a human hair are etched on to the lens.
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Electronic components are attached by floating them across the lens surface, where capillary forces suck each one into the right-sized hole. The eye relies on only a small amount of light entering the pupil at a time, so wearers will still be able to see through the lens, while the circuitry is built around the edge.

Mr Parviz plans more sophisticated components to show detailed pictures, and it is possible to include a zoom function. The lenses have been tried on animals but there will be tough safety tests before the technology is developed for people.

Dr Chris Baber, a reader in interactive technology at Birmingham University, said: “The key is how they fit on to a person and ensuring they provide the right information at the right time.”

. . .