Robot transport for military

Washington Times:

A khaki-colored, rugged-looking Jeep with an orange strobe light on top carried no driver or passenger. It accelerated uphill, but stopped seconds later to avoid a pedestrian mannequin veering toward its course.

The vehicle started again, passing another mannequin walking parallel to the roadway.

Then it stopped and traveled back along the same stretch of asphalt. It stopped dozens of yards past its initial braking point.

A team of engineers had trailed the vehicle, observing the government-contracted experiment.

And the General Dynamics Robotics Systems' Second Generation Tactical Autonomous Combat-Chassis, or T2, headed up the Maryland Police and Correctional Training Commissions' Driver Training Facility course again.

...

Mr. Kowachek said soldiers are already using systems for unmanned missions, but someone is responsible for guiding the equipment. Those systems rely on cameras and a robust bandwidth infrastructure to send the images back to a computer staffed by someone.

By using T2, personnel in the field could program the robot and let it work by itself.

"You can't expect them to do any better than a human," Mr. Kowachek said. "But if we can get them to do as well as humans, we'd be very happy."

Robotic warfare is coming and it will not be limited to jeeps delivering items to the front. If they can teach the bots to recognize humans they can teach them to target them too and discriminate between friend and foe.

While the article stresses that these bots are created for repetitive task, I think they can do much more.