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Comment by jotm | Hacker News Reader

Disaster recovery, assistance and space applications (asteroid mining?) are the only real applications of these robots.

This is not going to be useful in the military. The only advantage it may have over humans is increased accuracy, and even then, a mobile gun platform on wheels will do a much better job.

This robot is less mobile, less reliable, less endurable, much less smart and much less flexible than any average soldier. The only applications I can think of are extreme weather conditions (i.e. Antarctica and the Sahara desert), and even then it would probably fail fast.

I don't think it's complete garbage, it's just that I don't see it being close to useful in real military applications this century.

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There are many applications of humanoid robots when they become good and cheap. Right now they are neither, but DARPA is funding people to work on this.

Cheap, good humanoid robots will fill the slave niche in society, without the ethical problems (at least in terms of the slaves themselves - it might not be good for us to be slave owners, but we'll see how that pans out). Who said the researchers are or should be thinking about only this century?

By the way, a mobile gun platform on wheels is not going to be great in built-up areas. This is why we don't have combat soldiers fighting in powered wheelchairs, and why Daleks suck.

> ...without the ethical problems...

I think that is a bit too optimistic. Political battles over robots' rights are inevitable.

Edit: I think this is also relevant: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/robotandbaby/

OK, how about "greatly reduced ethical problems".

As long as we're still killing and eating animals, we can make robots work for us.

Also, ideally we'll build them to like it. Then it'd be unkind to let them rest.

"Real" military applications, perhaps not.

"Pseudo-military" operations, i.e. in our rapidly militarizing civilian police forces, perhaps not so far off.

You think a police robot is easier than a soldier robot? Why?

Both services are deploying robots as fast as they can. Thousands are in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Cost of training per role is probably a pretty good metric.

The cost of training a human pilot is higher than a shoe-store clerk. Software already pilots planes very well, but working in a shoe store is very hard for a robot.

> Thousands are in Iraq and Afghanistan

Those are not humanoid.

Right, but the grandparent suggested that we'd see such robots in police applications before military. I'm asking why he thinks this is so. We are not seeing this with the non-humanoids.

You are raising a good point, but you are probably wrong ("this century").

Tracked vehicles run by joystick are now used operationally for IEDs. There are resupply and "lug extra cargo" missions that Big Dog is very close to fulfilling right now. There are "augment human teams" missions that smaller legged, tracked, and wheeled platforms are getting close to fulfilling. (Go into this building and look around, take up this position and guard this building entrance while the rest of the team goes in elsewhere.)

The humanoid robot can perform these tasks in a more versatile way, as mentioned elsewhere in these comments, because it can adapt to many real world situations where humans are present (e.g., doors, stairs, ladders, vehicles).

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