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Robowar

Written by Gregory Benford

Illustrated by Laura Givens

Most likely, robots will make our battlefields less bloody

…for some.

People seem to especially like to order others around. That may be the greatest social use of robots.

—Isaac Asimov, in conversation

In 1994 Michael Thorpe, a former model maker at George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic, began public, live robot fights in San Francisco. These Robot Wars began as displays of engineering craft and imagination, allowing the geek community of the area to show off their inventive, destructive talents. Most of the gladiators looked like moving junk piles, springing clever knives, hammers, spikes, electrical arcs and other instruments of mayhem upon their opponents.

Thorpe quickly drew a large audience. Hundreds of technonerds proved quite willing to spend thousands of dollars and hours of labor to make combatants that they hoped might survive for a few minutes in the ring.

A few of the battlers looked benign, but even that was a disguise. A 14-year-old girl brought a ladybug-looking robot whose pretty red shell lifted to deploy a hook, which then skewered rivals. Their very names aimed at intimidation—Toecrusher, Mauler, The Hammer, Stiletto.

Their audience grew steadily until a legal dispute closed the games, but not before a promoter saw their potential. Similar contests went through a brief pay-per-view series, then ended in 2000 with a slot on TV's Comedy Central. There, "battlebots" showed their dual nature—focus for malicious mayhem, plus inadvertent comedians. They offer ritual violence directed by their creators using remote control, so they are only the simplest sort of the robot species, incapable of independent thinking and action.

These are techno versions of aggression, a weird blend of the "sports" of cock fighting and tractor pulls—and the direct descendants of demolition derbies. The audience experiences both jolts of slashing, banging violence and the hilarity of absurd scrap heap machines doing each other in. Robot toys have been around for decades, but they were weak, simple and did no real damage. Robowar fighters are genuinely dangerous.

We have become used to connecting with events like these, through adroit identification with technology. Since the 1950s children could buy robot toys, which steadily got better. Sojourner's 100-meter voyage on Mars in the 1990s, which took an agonizing month to accomplish, enraptured millions. The adventures of later plucky Mars rovers (Spirit, Opportunity) took them through many-kilometer journeys lasting years. With telepresence human guidance, even time-delayed at Mars, this capability is developing very quickly as software takes over the routine navigation and piloting between commanded destinations.

The Gulf War of 1991 and then Gulf War II of 2003 onward both provided robo-conflict without Allied blood. In Gulf War I the machines died (at least on the allied side) far more scenically (smart bombs, etc.) than the few allied casualties; Iraqi losses got much less play. In the Second Gulf War several hundred robots dug up roadside bombs and a robot attack plane, The Predator, quietly prowled the skies day and night, inflicting casualties usually without warning. In 2005 the first robot bomb disposer appeared in Baghdad; it could shoot back with good aim at 1000 rounds a minute. A soldier nearby controlled it with a wireless laptop, the first offensive robot used in combat. Some got destroyed. Newscasters then used "kill" to describe the destruction of both people and machines. Then in 2005 came robot infantry, able to assault and fire while moving forward on tank-like treads. Plainly, more is to come.

Commanding these at a distance recalls a video game quality, and indeed, the troops using them have a long background in such skills. Fresh into the millennium, this gives us TV's BattleBots with its three minute slam-bang bouts. Here is violence both real and absurd, calling up memories of the delicious humor of the old Road Runner cartoons. Robots assault each other with clippers, buzz saws, spikes, crushing jaws, and other ingenious devices, often cobbled together from domestic machines like lawn mowers and power tools. In their BattleBox they can use any strategy, inflicting mortal wounds, while the human audience sits safely beyond the BattleBox's shatterproof glass walls, watching flying debris clatter against the barrier. The Box has its own tricks, with sledges, rods, saws and other bedevilments which pop up randomly to wound one or both the combatants.

All this gets played for ironic laughter, with over-the-top commentary from the sidelines. The rules of human combat get satirized into weight categories: lightweights below 87 pounds, up to super-heavyweight between 316 and 488 pounds. Their creators range from aging engineers to 12-year-old Junior High amateurs. A certain cachet attaches to one who has made his or her robot from the least expensive parts, and especially from scrap.

More such shows are coming, like the SciFi Channel's "Robodeath." Though the robots now contending have budgets of only a few thousand dollars, inevitably under the pressure of ratings the sums will rise. Roller robots built from blenders will give way to walking, stalking specialists with specifically designed pincers or scythes or guns.

History's arms race between human armies will be rerun in madcap, technofreak fashion on full fast forward. The warriors will get heavier, their armor thicker. Instead of being run by their creators from the sidelines, there will come competitions for robots that can direct themselves, concoct strategies in real time, assess opponents' weaknesses and find new uses for their own armaments.

All in good fun, of course. But as the human battlefield begins to accept more machines with greater capabilities, the comic mayhem of BattleBots will blend in the evolutionary chain with the coming of combat robots fighting among humans—and finally, inevitably, against them.

In the 1984 film Terminator, a woman confronted with the nonstop violence between a robot killing machine and a man sent to save her, asks, "It will never be over, will it?" Once machines can fight on equal terms with humans, what social force could stop their use? Worse, if directed by artificial intelligences, would fighter robots not carry out the competition between these two intelligent "species" inhabiting the Earth?

The relentless energy of the Terminator class of robot (Arnold Schwartznegger) confirms this woman's wary prediction as it pursues the two humans with single-minded ferocity, until crushed by a foundry press. That advanced robotic intelligence could have the fanatical concentration of humans, with immense strength and endurance added, makes their use as soldiers seem inevitable.

Robot Armies?

Most robot research funding comes from the US Department of Defense. Obviously armies would rather lose a machine than a man. Robots don't get hungry, feel fear, forget orders, or care if the robot next to them gets killed. Even better, for the accountants, they have no downstream medical or retirement plans. In 2005 the Pentagon owed its soldiers, sailors and airmen $653 billion in future retirement benefits, which it had no clear plan to pay. Indeed, each fighting man costs $4 million over his median lifetime. Robot fighters will certainly cost less than a tenth of that. They can even be retrofitted later for domestic jobs and sold off.

The Bosnian conflict of the late 1990s was the first campaign fought without a single casualty on one side, because the U.S. used only aircraft. None were robots, but that lossless victory whetted appetites and has probably set the mold. In 2000 Congress told the armed services to develop within a decade robotic ground vehicles and deep-strike aircraft. The goal is to make about a third of all such machines independent. The goal is combat without casualties.

And some things machines can always do better than people, anyway. Some innovations are already about to be deployed in the field.

Crawlers

The Micro Unattended Mobility System (MUMS) device, currently under development—is a small, autonomous vehicle no larger than 3 inches across and 12 inches long. It will be robust enough to travel on its own, and survive the high accelerations and decelerations associated with ground penetrations, suffering peak impacts of 1,500 G. (In the long run, it might be sent forth from a grenade launcher.)

This crawler uses two side-by-side wheels that drag behind them an active tail, which can double as an antenna. Its central body houses electronics and a suite of navigation and surveillance sensors, including a modular GPS antenna, communications antenna, seismic sensor, microphone, electromagnetic detectors, and perhaps chemical sniffers more sensitive than a human nose.

The MUMS rover's embedded intelligence system will be controlled by iRobotics' own Behavior Control software, featuring, as a brochure has it, "redundant sensing and flexible system architecture." Overlapping and redundant sensing makes systems robust in the face of sensor noise, failure, or unexpected conditions, such as loss of primary communication or sensors. Flexible system architecture adds supervisory layers to observe its own lower performance and notice problems. At present, self-moving robots often repeatedly run into the same obstacle or get caught in a cyclical path. The MUMS higher levels introduce a random action or series of actions, a simple way to add an element of "creativity" that often allows it to overcome or "solve" unexpected situations.

Again, such mobile sensor systems will first be used for covert surveillance and reconnaissance, but the need to travel unnoticed into hostile environments is not unique to the military. Since MUMS robots do not require airdrop, they can also help out law enforcement that needs to covertly position sensors to collect intelligence during standoff situations.

The next generation will feature combined wearable computers and mobile robots. For military use, the robot becomes part of a reconnaissance team, able to respond to verbal orders with local initiative and intelligence. The robot moves in advance of its human team members, keeping them in a safe position while sending back video images and gathered intelligence.

A soldier will direct and monitor the robot's progress through a wearable intuitive interface, at a distance of about a kilometer. The system will use natural voice recognition, a head-mounted display and head tracking, so the robot will know that the command is, "Go in the direction I'm looking." The soldier will use a head-mounted display with computer generated graphic overlays. At first they will look like deadly toy trucks on treads, with camera snouts pointing front, side and rear, a machine gun that can be slaved to the cameras, and able to hear and smell. Weighing around 100 pounds, they will cruise at about walking speed and keep it up for four hours on lithium-ion batteries.

The soldier will be able to hear what the robot does, and maneuver it with a hand-held joystick, so combat will ape home computer games. This is no accident. A generation has trained using these entertainments, which in turn have been shaped by market forces to be the easiest and most responsive to use.

Beyond that era, robo-fighters will need less supervision. They will increasingly react, see and think like people, while going places we could not.

Underwater Rovers

This class of autonomous robots seeks to equal the efficiency, acceleration, and maneuvrability of fish. Biologically inspired, they use flexible, wiggling, actuated hulls able to produce the large accelerations needed for fishlike bursts of speed and sudden swerves. They mechanically approximate a