CBS News Outs Killer Robot Dogs

(CBS) There's a new dog in town this week at the annual RoboCup championships in Japan. That's where robots of various shapes and sizes compete in soccer games. The U.S. favorite is a team from Carnegie Mellon University, which took a battery-driven robotic dog sold by Sony Corp., fed its souped-up brain new software and turned it into a competitive team player.

As CBS News Correspondent Jim Stewart reports, it even has a little victory dance after scoring a goal and pouts when it loses. They're just cute as all get-out, but this is where our story takes a turn, because Carnegie Mellon has been working with these puppies under a grant from the Defense Advanced Projects Agency, or DARPA, which wants to find a way to use similar robots on the battlefield.

DARPA, which always has its eye not so much on the current war as much as the next one, declined to talk about the project. But the aim seems clear: Can robots trained as team players - just as these can recognize one player from another - be retrained as scouts? Could they then even be fitted with weapons, like unmanned Predator surveillance aircraft, and become killers as well?

Thanks to CBS for exposing this evil plan. I thought the military was only spending $21 BILLION on battlefield robots. I did not know they were also training covert robot soccer dogs.


CBS News | Pentagon Goes To The Robotic Dogs | July 21, 2005�21:30:02