Roomba to Rambo to Mike Brady

By | October 5, 2005
1 Comment

Via GeekPress, the company that brought us Roomba — the cute, almost cuddly household cleaning robot — is moving into some surprising new territory:

IRobot Corp. of Burlington, famous for its robotic vacuum cleaners, has teamed up with researchers at Boston University to develop a military robot capable of spotting enemy snipers.IRobot demonstrated the system, called REDOWL (for Robot Enhanced Detection Outpost with Lasers), at the Association of the United States Army convention in Washington yesterday. Testers struck pieces of metal to simulate gunshots. REDOWL quickly aimed its infrared camera and laser rangefinder at the source of the noise, just as it did in tests at a Medfield gun range.

REDOWL is based on PackBot, which was the first IRobot unit to be drafted into military service. PackBot is the Ensign Redshirt of the military robot world, scouting out dangerous terrain and being the first to enter buildings that may be booby trapped.

If this REDOWL business starts to sound a little too much like the Terminator, fear not. At least not yet:

In theory, a REDOWL system could fire back at an enemy, but [deputy director of the Boston University Photonics Center Glenn] Thoren said the hardware isn’t strong enough to support the weight of a gun. Besides, he said, it would be dangerous to have a weapon-toting robot that could open fire on its own.

“You need to have a man in the loop,” he said.

I just wonder whether IRobot realizes what they’re potentially sitting on, should they start to combine some of these functions. Say you had a robot that would be the first in for any dangerous situation, that warded off bad guys, and that vacuumed. Shucks, throw in a tolerance for chick flicks and some basic childrearing skills — as well as a good-providing career like, say, architecture — and we’re well on our way to the world’s first robotic husband.

We need to watch out, fellas. It isn’t just factory jobs that can be replaced by automation.

  • tcobb

    …and we’re well on our way to the world’s first robotic husband.
    Maybe this is how advanced species end, and why we see no obvious signs of other intelligent life out in the universe. Once you can create perfect mates, either as robots or full sensory virtual reality constructs, who don’t get mood swings, get fat, or cheat on you, the species simply quits reproducing. We are already seeing something like that in most of the more highly advanced industrial world, where the breeding rate has fallen below that of the death rate. Its more comfortable to have an existence where you don’t have umpteen children running around your abode, but just think what would happen if everyone could have their own ideal mate or mates conjured up by a computer program? And the same thing goes for friends. The idea of the “singularity” might indeed be a quantum leap in human evolution, but it also holds the danger of being an opium den from which no one ever comes out alive.