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Comment by simion314 | Hacker News Reader

The video also shows the dog robot, each time I see it I imagine there are versions with machine guns on their backs and get anxious, I would stop showing the dogs ones in the unrelated PR materials.

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Take any quadcopter, attach high explosives to it, ram them into people and blow them up. While you are at it, throw on a cheap raspberry pi with some simple machine learned computer vision to target humans.

There, I made you afraid of cheap $100 quadcopters off Amazon and raspberry Pis.

My duder you should watch this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HipTO_7mUOw

True, but there are like 1 billion more real world examples where this devices are used in production, so if you see a drone on the sky you think that is probably some kid with his toy, if you see the dog robot what scenario are you imagining ? (assume you are not on a big city with a university)

as someone who was into building quadcopters in the DIY drones community since somewhere around 2009, I can tell you that the majority of people who had the opportunity to see me flying my quadcopter (in the far-from-society rural wilderness, by the way) during the early days routinely bothered me about the danger of having such a large flying object, and whether or not I knew if anyone like me was placing weapons on-board.

Now you can buy larger quad-copters than I had built off the shelf.

Things change , people get used to it, opinions morph.

When robotic dogs and bipeds become more common place, people will become less threatened by them just due to sheer anxiety fatigue, if not more friendly reasons.

My take : when I see a robotic dog I think "That's a corporation with a spending budget!"

I can't deny what you say is true but something about the Dog and Mule robots is very creepy and disturbing on a deep, visceral level that I don't get from quadcopters.

Most of them cannot carry any significant loads.

Standard hand grenade is roughly 400g / 1 pound; 40mm grenade launcher ammo often is half a pound / 230 grams.

That's considered reasonably effective by the militaries, and fully within the capabilities of many cheap quadcopters.

You don't need a very significant load to blow up a person.

I would like to see Myth Busters like video trying this versus other methods (probably is not legal though). If the target is a bit suspicious then i can't see them waiting for a drone to land on their head before it detonates. From I read on news still idiots with guns commit more terrorist attacks. My intuition is that we will see robot dogs with machine guns mass shootings rather then AI drone dropping a grenade.

I recall videos of quadcopters dropping grenades and mortar rounds (for accuracy - they can drop one within a trench or at the door of a trench-shelter, unlike firing a mortar from distance) as improvised weapons a few years ago in the Ukraine Donbass conflict.

More advanced "loitering munitions" (essentially, drones that fly around until they're sent to slam into a target) were used in the recent Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

I believe that all these cases were human-in-the-loop for various reasons, but the possibility for automated targeting seems reachable soon if the armies would really want it (which is not certain).

In Syria and Iraq quadrotors with bombs were used pretty extensively, first by ISIL and then later by the Iraqi state. They were used to target small groups of infantry and vehicles [0].

In another case, small CoTS RC planes did significant damage to a Russian airbase in Syria [1].

[0]: Death From Above: The Drone Bombs of the Caliphate https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2017/02/10/death-drone-...

[1]: Russia Offers New Details About Syrian Mass Drone Attack, Now Implies Ukrainian Connection https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/17595/russia-offers-ne...

This big drones also make me anxious, the difference they did not popup on HN or my Youtube, the only drones I seen before today were the ones used for filming. So yeah an AI controlled large done with face recognition and machine guns also gives me chills, I am thinking that at this moment some military dudes are creating strategies to combine the dogs and drones to create a "police" force somewhere.

You don't need a machine gun. If you are using computer aiming and stabilization at close distances, it would almost never miss. A suppressed tube of subsonic .22lr would be quiet, accurate, and very light.

I'm torn on that scenario. They do not feel fear or worry about self preservation. There is no such thing as "I thought he had a gun and felt threatened."

I could see plenty of "I thought he had a gun" scenarios, we're just chopping off the "...and felt threatened" part. Unless the robot accompanies a group of humans and decides they are threatened by the situation. It becomes "I thought he had a gun and decided the humans with me or around me were threatened". Maybe these robots could be outfitted to coat a person in immobilizing goo or something rather than filling them full of holes. Or long range tasers. Or tranq darts.

Just don't call it a war dog! Boston Dynamics might get upset.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56182268

> [Boston Dynamics] warned that if the "spectacle" goes ahead, Spot's warranty might be voided, meaning it could not be updated.

Wait, so they reserve the right to void your warranty if you use their product to make art?

I remember there was a case where a company bricked someone's device because they left a bad review[0], but having companies judge the artistic merit of their customers' use cases seems somehow even more dystopian.

[0] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/iot-company-bricks-cust...

Current flying drones are a lot scarier thsn dogs with machine guns

Especially when you add a flame thrower - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3_eEO0Cvwg

Are there such drones without human remote control?

What would help at least me is to see this dogs actually used for something useful where they are the best solution, what I mean used in production not demos - because I can't imagine that many scenarios where are a good solution over a drone or a robot with wheels.

Yes. Definitely. autonomous flying air craft are not new. much easier compared to anything moving on the ground. object and path detections is arguably less likely to fail being less contact with terrain.

>Are there such drones without human remote control?

To be realistic. Spot (the dog) is not autonomous currently either. In fact it doesn't even use "AI", all of its movements are electrical and mechanical control theory on steroids ;)

The BD customer can integrate an AI to direct movements if desired but it's not what BD ships. BD instead offers a human operated remote control with camera system.

Any idea What is it good for?

SpaceX uses them to inspect still burning crashed spaceships (minutes post-crash).

Do they do it for PR reasons? i assume you can use drones more effectively.

Why do you think so? A drone has to be piloted the whole time, while a dog can be positioned and stay there with no further piloting or energy requirement. I also imagine that piloting a drone around hissing gas and in low vision could be problematic.

So if SpaceX needs video of the landing/crash sites then you could buy a few drones instead of a single dog. Because of possible debris and fire on the ground I also expect a drone would be better, and if teh land is clear then a drone could also be configured to land and film from the ground(because you could afford multiple ones you can have different configurations).

I might be missing something though, a scenario where an robot with legs can do better then a flying or wheeled one.

Fires, especially large hots ones, create wind and other aerodynamic instability.

> I imagine there are versions with machine guns on their backs

That actually sounds even more awesome :)

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