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Department of Defense Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program

Develop a software/hardware suit that would enable a multi-robot team, together with a human operator, to search for and detect a non-cooperative human subject.

The main research task will involve determining the movements of the robot team through the environment to maximize the opportunity to find the subject, while minimizing the chances of missing the subject. If the operator is an active member of the search team, the software should minimize the chance that the operator may encounter the subject.

The software should maintain awareness of line-of-sight, as well as communication and sensor limits. It will be necessary to determine an appropriate sensor suite that can reliably detect human presence and is suitable for implementation on small robotic platforms.

www.dodsbir.net/SITIS/display_topic.asp?Bookmark=34565
www.infowars.com/?p=5507

The New Scientist: "How long before we see packs of droids hunting down pesky demonstrators with paralysing weapons? Or could the packs even be lethally armed?”
www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2008/10/packs-of-robots-w
ill-hunt-down.html?DCMP=ILC-hmts&nsref=specrt13_head_Pack%20hunting%20robots

Leeds Metropolitan University: "The giveaway here is the phrase ‘a non-cooperative human subject’. What we have here are the beginnings of something designed to enable robots to hunt down humans like a pack of dogs. Once the software is perfected we can reasonably anticipate that they will become autonomous and become armed."

“If you have an autonomous robot then it’s going to make decisions who to kill, when to kill and where to kill them. The scary thing is that the reason this has to happen is because of mission complexity and also so that when there’s a problem with communications you can send a robot in with no communication and it will decide who to kill, and that is really worrying to me.”
-Dr Noel Sharkey, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at the University of Sheffield
www.infowars.net/articles/february2008/290208Robots.htm

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