from Hacker News

Marines Test Fire Robot Dog Armed with Rocket Launcher

by kposehn on 10/19/23, 11:20 PM with 48 comments

• by reallymental on 10/19/23, 11:32 PM

  As a human, this looks terrifying. Imagine being attacked by robot dogs. Now imagine being attacked by robot dogs that have rocket launchers!

  Straight out of a Fast & Furious movie. You can(!) make this shit up.

  But as a person in tech, where all my values are directed towards "making a better world"... this also goes against every ideal we have. Unless you count living in a world where we have the ability to exterminate a large amount of people without proportional retaliation as a "better world", in a non-nuclear way.

  We don't use biological weapons, so why use seeing robots with rockets on them? Oh yeah I forgot, we can't "catch a disease" from these robots, and they have a "limited" damage capability, unlike bio-warfare that can go out of hand and can poison lands.

  Coincidentally, the second point also means that we'll have to make a lot of them, and gosh darn it we'll have to build more factories and supply jobs to people. Wait a min...

  I'm really happy that less marines will be put in harms way when they try to launch missiles from their shoulders (also crazy if you think about it too much), but they did sign up for it, and they're not facing an army that can comprehend what's coming towards them.

  I've got competing opinions in my head, but one thing is for sure, autonomous warfare can either be a chess game that countries play (as a proxy for all the human lives), or the final game we'll play.

• by LinuxBender on 10/19/23, 11:23 PM

  None of the "on a dog" designs make sense to me. Robot tanks have always been able to maneuver over tougher obstacles and much harder to knock over and are significantly faster. Some tanks with the tall tracks can right-side themselves. Stability is important with aimed weapons. A tank can have a turret with multiple projectile devices and could fire any direction. A dog would fall over firing sideways. So why do we keep using the dog form?

• by beambot on 10/19/23, 11:33 PM

  Atop a chinese-made Unitree dog? Huh. Did the DoD learn nothing from ceding drone supremacy to DJI?

• by gwnywg on 10/19/23, 11:42 PM

  When I first saw Boston Dynamic's Atlas I thought "I wonder when will they fit a firearm to that". I was hoping my first thought was out of my cynism or bad sense of humour...

• by Johnny555 on 10/19/23, 11:33 PM

  “Instead of having a Marine handle the weapon system, manipulate the safeties, we could put a remote trigger mechanism on it that allowed it to all be done remotely,

  If its remotely activated with the same control channel as the trigger, that seems like less of a "safety" and more of a "shooty".

• by wrp on 10/20/23, 6:51 AM

  So, they strapped an M72 LAW on the back of a little robot dog. I can see a couple practical problems with getting anything like this configuration to work. One is that since the M72 is unguided, it takes fine targeting skill to make a hit from any distance. I doubt whether you can get that kind of control with a video feed mounted on a rickety platform.

  Another problem is agility of the robot. Armor in a well managed battlefield will have an infantry screen. That is why getting close enough for a kill is hard. To avoid getting shot by defending forces, the robot would need to race in, quickly changing direction, and pop up close enough for a kill. I've seen robot dogs going through their paces and they don't look nearly capable enough for this.

• by kvonhorn on 10/20/23, 12:39 AM

  Won't be long now before we're reading a post about a robot dog with a suicide vest taking out a target softer than an armored vehicle.

  The article neglects to mention that shipping is $1000, according to the Unitree website.

• by perihelions on 10/20/23, 12:13 AM

  - "Designs based on tracked robots primarily designed for explosive ordnance disposal work have been and continue to be developed."

  And also for the exact opposite: the Ukrainian conflict sees similar tracked robots used to place landmines.

  https://old.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/17ax9mx/russ... ("Russians watch Ukrainian WALL-E laying mines (subtitles)")

• by Sporktacular on 10/19/23, 11:41 PM

  Humanity is coming along nicely.

• by senectus1 on 10/20/23, 12:42 AM

  ok thats cool.I was just playing with one of these last night.

  The owners were making behave like a playful puppy and holy hell was it agile and fun to play with.

  it sat up and begged, it jumped back and forth like a puppy that wants to play would do... it rolled over and flipped itself back onto its feet.

  amazing tech with a very short battery life.

• by iancmceachern on 10/20/23, 5:21 AM

  Hard no on this