On the March of the Robots of War...

bristol | peace | news report Sunday March 16, 2008 15:40 by IMO

The Symbrion Program and more.

A plan to create intelligent swarms of robots could be great for helping us, or could spear-head the next generation of military technology. This is where your taxes will be going over the next few years...and Bristol is one of the places it is being developed.

A remote-controlled hunter-killer drone

There is an EU funded program, to make robots in a swarm; "A £4.6 million project to create swarms of hundreds of autonomous, Transformer-style robots has been launched.

Scientists aim to create a prototype team of self-organizing, shape-changing mini robots that work as a team by 2013.

The self-healing robots will be able to dock with each other, share energy and co-operate to maximize their abilities to achieve different tasks.

Researchers from 10 universities who are collaborating in the European Union-funded Symbrion program say future applications include search and rescue missions, space exploration and medicine."

Prof Alan Winfield, of the University of the West of England, Bristol, said: "A swarm could be released into a collapsed building following an earthquake....They could form themselves into teams searching for survivors or to lift rubble off stranded people.....Some robots might form a chain allowing rescue workers to communicate with survivors while others assemble themselves into a ‘medicine bot' to give first aid...."The robots have functionality on their own, but they can also combine together or adapt and change as the situation requires....The individual robots won't change physically, but they will adapt and evolve their functionally."

Scientists involved in the Symbrion project will develop software that allows the individual robots – which will be around an inch square – to collaborate in order to use their different attributes to maximise their performance. They will develop the principles that can be built into hardware and software to allow robots swarms to evolve, adapt and collaborate without human supervision according to the situations they face. The initial prototype swarm will consist of several hundred individual autonomous units, each measuring around an inch square.

Prof Winfield denied the swarms could go wrong and cause harm to humans, but said scientists could not take responsibility for how societies decided to use them.

"It might sound like something scary from science fiction but it's not, it's just a complex engineering system....It will have to go through safety and validation assessments before it would be used in real-life situations....As scientists we behave ethically but we can't determine how these things might be used. That is a question for wider society to determine....He added the first robot swarms would be ready for use in real-life situations between 10 and 15 years from now.

Prof Noel Sharkey, of Sheffield University, last month predicted autonomous military robots that will make decisions about when and who to kill will be in use within a decade.

I know the recent budget was tight and the government had to raise taxes, but they still found about £1 billion to buy remote-controlled hunter-killer drones from the US for Afghanistan.

UWE, where this research will be based already has links to arms makers such as Rolls-Royce, Qinetiq, and Lockheed Martin.

As the proff says, "As scientists we behave ethically but we can't determine how these things might be used. That is a question for wider society to determine."

What do we think?

Links

http://www.symbrion.eu/

UWE Weapons Making Course
http://courses.uwe.ac.uk/h400/2008

£1 Billion on new radio-controlled hardware
http://anarchist606.blogspot.com/2008/03/opportunity-co....html