It's a corridor from a science fiction film with a robot butler to meet me. Except this isn't science fiction. It's the iRobot Development Laboratory in Boston, Massachusetts. We call this the hall of cool stuff.
And it really is cool stuff. is iRobot's managing director and this is one of the company's most famous robots. It's called a Packbot and this particular unit nicknamed Scooby-Doo was used for disarming roadside bombs in Iraq before it was destroyed.
You can see that the robot was used for 17 counter IED missions so this robot It was a very, very productive robot until the bad guys finally got it. If you're not fielding, you're failing. If you're not putting the children, the robots, out into the real world to do real work, you're not doing the right things. Hackbots like Scooby-Doo and other unmanned systems, as the military calls them, are changing the nature of warfare.
They currently perform dirty and dangerous jobs. like disarming bombs, but they'll soon be providing commanders with undreamt of capabilities. This one called the JamBot is being designed to literally ooze into places that a solid robot couldn't reach. There are also robot swarms being created, programmed to follow each other like ants or a flock of birds.
Today they can see, they can touch, they can move, they can navigate, they can talk in multiple languages. Down at the University of Maryland, just north of Washington, they're building the capabilities for robots to smell. Military robot numbers are increasing dramatically, according to author P.W.
Singer, who is one of the world's leading experts. on 21st century battle. The U.S. military that went into Iraq in 2003 had a handful of drones supporting it, these pilotless planes, unmanned aerial systems are what they are officially called. We had a handful.
We now have over 7,000 in the U.S. military inventory. On the ground, the invasion force had zero. There's now 12,000 in the U.S. military inventory. In fact, there was a report just yesterday that one out of every 50 soldiers is a robot now. That transformation hasn't come easily.
It's taken a lot of hard work by the robotics industry to prove itself. A number of years ago, I would say our technology was tolerated on the battlefield. We were somewhat unreliable.
It was sort of the new gimmick that Washington said we ought to take to battle with us, things like that. It launches similar to our Shadow launcher. You can see the sled here that the aircraft rides in. Steve Reed works for AAI Systems, one of the leading makers of unmanned aircraft. Their Shadow drone has flown hundreds of thousands of combat hours, one of AAI's earliest aircraft.
was the first robot to ever have a human surrender to it. Shown here as Iraqi soldiers waved down a drone with white flags at the end of Operation Desert Storm. We had not yet earned our stripes on the battlefield, but certainly over the last five years now we're demanded to be on the battlefield. Some of our U.S. Army customers have told us they won't go outside of the fixed operating base on a raid without an unmanned air vehicle asset overhead.
The appeal of robot soldiers is obvious. The makers of this one, known as the Talon, say it gives soldiers unprecedented tactical patience. And tactical patience means when an armed robot is facing the enemy and is clearly visible, the whole intent of that armed robot is to get shot. The Talon is so robust that it's usually blown up 13 times before it's destroyed beyond repair.
That's 13 soldiers that are not lost in combat. It's our youngest soldiers and those closest to the fight. have such a pull for this technology. They know it can be useful, they know it will save their lives and that's what they they talk about.
They talk about it's gonna save my life. But the other secret to the robot's speedy integration has been their ease of use. Many of today's robots are driven with an off-the-shelf video game controller, making it so easy even a journalist can do it. Hello. We made a fundamental change to our robots four or five years ago, where we went to a game controller.
And immediately we saw the training time greatly reduce, the sophistication greatly increase, and we saw those thousands of hours that teenagers and young adults spend gaming directly applicable to unmanned systems operation. Can I have one? Those advantages have seen tele-operated robots spread far and wide.
There are now remote-controlled drones not just in the air, but on the ground and in the sea. But the video game-like nature of the technology has many concern that we're entering a new and inhuman phase of warfare. Always in history, well before video games, whether you were talking about the very first guns to strategic bombing campaigns in World War II, it's always been understood that the more you could create dissonance, the more you could create dissonance. distance from the target, the easier the shooter would find it. But then you layer on top of that with a digital native that's grown up playing video games and now their interface with war may be the same video game experience.
And I think a lot of people are concerned as to what happens next. And we honestly don't know because we're entering a space that we've never done before. We don't have any data. What happens next could be this.
Kinetic North America in Massachusetts. has been developing armed ground robots for years. This robot known as Mars can not only rove around a battlefield, it can fire on any target it finds, all remotely controlled by a soldier from a safe vantage point. Because the weapon system is stationed in a stationary robot, there's no breathing, there's no heavy, there's no movement of the weapon, there is very precise control of the trigger, more precise than a human can have.
And with the tactical patience, soldiers are instant marksmen. So far, military robots like these haven't had the capacity to act or even move by themselves. No autonomy, as it's called.
But that's starting to change. Soldiers are now telling us that they're willing to accept incremental autonomy. They want to do the mission, but when the mission is over, they want to push a button or use their voice and say, come on back.
And then they can start putting it away and have the confidence the robot will get from point A to point B without their intervention. Incremental autonomy is moving forward with those user requests. Autonomy is the most controversial word in robotics today.
Currently it most often means that a robot can find its way back to base or find a target on its own, but even that is changing. Do you think that we are close to having robot warfare? We certainly have some of the technical capabilities in place. David Kilcullen is a leading defense consultant who's advised the Bush and Obama administrations on military strategy. There's a whole other class of systems that's emerging now which are autonomous or semi-autonomous, so that The machine itself can decide, I'm going to shoot, and there's no human there making the decision.
I think that's a pretty freakish kind of idea, that you can have actual robot warfare as distinct from just remote control warfare. We all think of automatically something like the Terminator movies. Well, yes, we're using robotics in war, but no, they're not like the Terminator out there walking, making all of their own decisions, ready to take over at a moment's notice. This is the kind of nightmare scenario conjured up by robot warfare.
For decades, Hollywood films like The Terminator have played on our fears of autonomous killing machines. The robotics industry insists that this is nothing like the reality. Robots today can do both more than and less than what they can do.
Less than the public thinks. They are typically depicted in unflattering ways too often. And it's a real contrast, by the way, to the way robots are serving for real today. You industry observers believe that the current generation of ground robots are precursors to Terminator-style wars. Even so, many are disturbed.
by some of their capabilities. So not only can it turn a machine gun into a sniper rifle, but it also can hit an apple at 800 meters distance. The problem though, from sort of an ethical, moral standpoint, is that the machine may be able to hit that target at that distance, but it can't tell the difference between an apple and a tomato that any human two-year-old can naturally see the difference between them. And so, you know, apply that over to not just telling the difference between an apple and tomato, but the incredible tough judgment calls that soldiers have to make in battle of, is that an insurgent or is that a shopkeeper?
Is that a child or is that a child soldier? The reality is that there are currently no armed robots in service that can fire without a human issuing the order. But that's no longer due to technological limitations.
It's now a question of policy. The technology that's currently available and has been demonstrated at military bases throughout the world far exceeds commanders'willingness to use it on the battlefield because it is so new and so different and they're uncertain about what if something goes wrong. Whether or not the robots are making decisions on their own, they're already changing the decision-making of war planners.
and potentially making hostile acts more likely. I do think the fact that you're not putting a human being at risk by sending an uninhabited system into harm's way, by its very nature, is going to make it easier for people to think, well, you know, let's send in a drone. and see what happens. The US has conducted more airstrikes into Pakistan in the last couple of years with unmanned systems than we did with manned systems in the Kosovo War just a decade ago.
But interestingly enough, we don't call it a war. So somehow this technology changed the way we looked at what we used to see a war. That changing face of war was on display last month in Australia. For the first time, the Avalon Air Show in Victoria included a conference on unmanned aerial vehicles, and it attracted plenty of attention from the military.
The Australian Defence Forces declined Dateline's request for an interview on the subject, but they already have unmanned air, sea and land systems worth close to 200 million dollars, plans for another billion dollars to be spent over the next decade. Australia actually has a very substantial background in these kinds of platforms going back 50 years. So we actually have a pretty substantial national Australian interest in this technology.
Colonel Robert Sova of the US Army insists that soldiers will remain the decision-makers in the field. directing the work of the robots....Normally fire and fire forward. Certainly the Army's UAS strategy, the Department of Defense's UAS strategy is part of that, is that this is not a replacement for manned systems, it's complementary of having unmanned and manned systems working together to give a greater capability to the warfighter. The emergence of robots in warfare is going to be as game-changing as the invention of the tank or the atomic bomb.
Some people believe there is now a short window of opportunity for placing limits on how powerful and how autonomous we allow these tools to become. I think it's very, very important that we achieve an international consensus on what's acceptable. I also think it's an obligation on military planners, technology people and policy makers that if you are going to bring on a new technology, you owe it to yourself and everybody else to think that through carefully.