Unpacking the idea of armed ground robots.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew
• Position: Technology Tomorrow

It was the summer of 2007 when National Defense Magazine caught wind that the Army had sent three armed ground robots to Iraq.

This scoop and milestone in military history was important enough, the editors felt, to put the special weapons observation remote reconnaissance direct action system, or SWORDS, robot on the September cover. It included the teaser headline: "Will gun-toting machines replace soldiers?"

With the U.S. military embroiled in a largely urban war at the time, the application for a remotely controlled robot with a machine gun mounted on it seemed obvious: it could be used to reduce the exposure of ground troops by going around corners or entering buildings first. Gunshot wounds then were second only to improvised bombs when it came to battlefield casualties.

The Army had a requirement for 80 more armed robots, but they were never built or fielded.

Almost a decade later, armed ground robots are not in the U.S. military inventory and are, in fact, rarely discussed publicly. There are no programs of record in the Army or Marine Corps, although the latter seems to be more predisposed to the idea.

What happened?

First of all, the big news in 2007 didn't turn out to be so big. As the months went on, the magazine uncovered that they hadn't been used as intended. The story was that shortly before deployment, there was a demonstration for Army brass, and one of the robots displayed "involuntary movement." In other words, the chassis moved on its own without the operator commanding it. And understandably, that made the officers nervous.

The three SWORDS were sent to Iraq under a cloud of mistrust, and as this column spelled out in the October issue, a lack of trust between humans and robots can kill off a technology. This was an early example.

By the time SWORDS arrived in Iraq, the battlefield commander ordered that they be used as remote weapons stations. The chasses were weighed down by sand bags and they never moved from their fixed locations.

Armed robots since then have popped up in demonstrations every once in awhile. They drew big audiences at the so-called Robotics Rodeo at Fort Benning, Georgia, in 2010, when the newly rechristened modular advanced armed robotic system, MAARS, demonstrated its firepower in a mock village. Funded by the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory and built by QinetiQ North America, MAARS did what it was supposed to do: move out and lay down suppressive fire without exposing troops to the same.

Then...