#Autonomous smart sentry gun manual#
#Autonomous smart sentry gun password#
#Autonomous smart sentry gun Pc#

Robots reduce the need for humans in combat and therefore save the lives of soldiers, sailors and pilots. Six years later, hundreds of PackBot Tactical Mobile Robots were deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan to open doors in urban combat, lay optical fibre, defuse bombs and perform other hazardous duties that would have otherwise been carried out by humans.Īs early as 2005 the New York Times reported the Pentagon’s plans to replace soldiers with autonomous robots. In 2000, US Congress ordered that one-third of military ground vehicles and deep-strike aircraft should be replaced by robotic vehicles. The US military uses similar semi-autonomous robots designed for bomb disposal and surveillance. The past 15 years has seen a concerted development of such automated weapons and drones. But they were concerned the gun might make a mistake.” Technologically it wasn’t a problem for us. “But all of our customers asked for safeguards to be implemented. “Our original version had an auto-firing system,” he explains. It employs 150 staff, most of whom, like Park, are also engineers. Park works in the Robotic Surveillance Division of the company, which is based in the Yuseong tech district of Daejon. “It wasn’t initially designed this way,” explains Jungsuk Park, a senior research engineer for DoDAAM, the turret’s manufacturer.

#Autonomous smart sentry gun manual#

Then they must give the manual input that permits the turret to shoot.

#Autonomous smart sentry gun password#

The human operator must first enter a password into the computer system to unlock the turret’s firing ability.

The Super aEgis II, South Korea’s best-selling automated turret, will not fire without first receiving an OK from a human. “Turn back,” it says, in rapid-fire Korean. The sound is delivered with unimaginable precision, issuing a warning to a potential target before they are shot (a warning must precede any firing, according to international law, one of the lab-coat wearing engineers tells me).

Its voice has a range of three kilometres. The speaker, which must accompany the turret on all of its expeditions, is known as an acoustic hailing robot. The gun’s muzzle pans as the red square, like something lifted from futuristic military video game Call of Duty, moves across the screen. A targeting square blinks onto the computer screen, zeroing in on a vehicle that’s moving in the camera’s viewfinder. Pull the trigger and it will fire.Ī gaggle of engineers standing around the table flinch as, unannounced, a warning barks out from a massive, tripod-mounted speaker. Another measures the distance from the gun to its target. A laminated sheet is taped to the table in front of the controller, reporting the function of its various buttons.

#Autonomous smart sentry gun Pc#

Next to the keyboard sits a complicated joystick, the kind a PC flight simulator enthusiast might use. It spreads across the landscape: four kilometres-worth of territory, enough distance to penetrate deep into the city from this favourable vantage point. Another presents a top down satellite view of the scene, like a laid-out Google Map, trained menacingly on our position.Ī red cone, overlaid on the image, indicates the turret’s range. One shows a 180-degree, fish-eye sweep of the horizon in front of us. Instead, the cable slithers up onto a trestle table before plunging into the back of a computer, whose screen displays a colourful patchwork of camera feeds. An ethernet cable leads from the gun’s base and trails through the tidy grass into a small gazebo tent that, in the Korean afternoon heat, you'd be forgiven for hoping might contain plates of cucumber sandwiches and a pot of tea. 50 calibre, the sort that can stop a truck in its tracks – is draped over one shoulder. It’s about the size of a large dog plump, white and wipe-clean. On a green hill overlooking the tree-lined perimeter of Daejeon, a city in central South Korea, a machine gun turret idly scans the horizon.