WITH American military casualties climbing, the US Army is preparing to send 18 remote-controlled robotic warriors to fight in Iraq in March or April. Made by a small Massachusetts company, the SWORDS, short for Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems, will be the first armed robotic vehicles to see combat, years ahead of the larger Future Combat System vehicles currently under development by big defence contractors such as Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics Corp. Military officials like to compare the roughly metre-high robots favourably to human soldiers: They don't need to be trained, fed or clothed. They can be boxed up and warehoused between wars. They never complain. And there are no letters to write home if they meet their demise in battle. But officials are quick to point out that these are not the autonomous killer robots of science fiction. A SWORDS robot shoots only when its human operator presses a button after identifying a target on video shot by the robot's cameras. "The only difference is that his weapon is not at his shoulder, it's up to half a mile a way," Foster-Miller Inc general manager of Talon robots Bob Quinn said. As one marine fresh out of boot camp said after seeing the robot: "This is my invisibility cloak."
Mr Quinn said it was a "bootstrap development process" to convert a Talon robot, which has been in military service since 2000, from its main mission — defusing roadside bombs in Iraq — into the gunslinging SWORDS. It was a joint development process between the army and Foster-Miller. Working with soldiers and engineers at Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey, it took just six months and only about $US2 million ($2.6 million) in development money to outfit a Talon with weapons, according to Mr Quinn and Picatinny technology manager Anthony Sebasto. The Talon had already proven itself to be pretty rugged. One was blown from the roof of a Humvee and into a nearby river by a roadside bomb in Iraq. Soldiers simply opened its shrapnel-pocked control unit and drove the robot out of the river, Mr Quinn said.
Its developers say its tracks, like those on a tank, can overcome rock piles and barbed wire, though it needs a ride to travel faster than 7km/h. Running on lithium ion batteries, it can operate for one to four hours at a time, depending on the mission. Operators work the robot using a control unit which has two joysticks, a handful of buttons and a video screen. Mr Quinn says that may eventually be replaced by a "Game Boy" type of controller hooked up to virtual reality goggles. The army has been testing it over the past year at Picatinny and the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland to ensure it won't malfunction and can stand up to radio jammers and other countermeasures.