Packing an M249 machine gun and laced in camouflage treads what may be the next caliber of U.S. soldier. But at roughly three feet tall, with night vision embedded in its mechanical eyes and a battery life of around four hours, the military’s newest recruit comes not from the ordinary military training camp but off the technological assembly line.

Originally slated for deployment in Iraq this month, but postponed to an unspecified later date, the remote-controlled SWORDS, or Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection, is set to become the first armed mobile robot to see offensive ground combat. The U.S. Army hopes that with the availability of an infantry robot to support ground forces and engage in the high-risk combat tasks, the military will yield fewer human casualties.

“Our soldiers are saying this device will keep (them) alive,” said Bob Quinn, spokesman for Foster-Miller, the technology company that designed SWORDS.

Despite their potential of saving American lives, Rackham student and roboticist Steven Collins balks when he considers the long-term consequences of such technology.

If robot soldiers like SWORDS do succeed in reducing the military’s casualty rate and increasingly take the stead of human troops in the future, Collins fears warfare will unfold into an even deadlier affair: without the cost of human lives weighed in America’s decision to engage in armed conflict, unnecessary wars become all too easy for the U.S. to wage.

“There’s a lot of good uses for robots,” Collins said. “Sticking a gun on them for battle may be one of them. But I don’t think we are ready for it. Psychologically we are not. … The potential for abuse is overwhelming.”

In the last decade, robots have seen an increase in use by the military as U.S. forces have actively deployed non-combat robots to the battlefield like unmanned aerial vehicles outfitted for air reconnaissance to mine detecting seeker bots.

But SWORDS crosses a threshold where the military only dares stride since it is specifically designed for combat operations. Some University roboticists like Collins cringe at this new undertaking, protecting their own research from following the same fate as SWORDS and hoping the military will realize the flaws in their vision. Extending to the political, philosophical and ethical spectrum, the issue of using robots as weapons reflects the complex fallout between the military and scientists and the ongoing use of the evolving technology for war.

ROBOT VISIONS

Collins builds bi-pedal walking robots in the hopes his research will one day result in artificial prostheses for amputees. Robot walkers will never take the form of soldiers like SWORDS since they are impractical for killing he says. And for that, Collins said he is relieved.

“I am glad to say that our robots will very likely never be of any use militarily. If we thought they might, we wouldn’t be developing them,” he said.

For Collins, military robots like SWORDS break the ethical boundaries of what technology is acceptable and what technology should be forbidden.

Like the science-fiction movies that depict out-of-control robots taking over the world, Collins fears employing robotic technology for military purposes will give way to disaster. Yet his fears stem not from robots disobeying their masters, but from the masters misusing the robots.

The potential benefits of supplanting human soldiers with robots are enormous militarily, Collins said.

“In the long-term future, people have speculated that human conflicts could simply be fought out by machines with no cost in human life,” he said. With the development of such technology like SWORDS, that future may be realized, and the cost of war will be minimized, Collins added. But with an American public already desensitized to war, the last safeguard preventing nations from resorting to military confrontation will be removed, Collins said.

“We only seem to weigh the cost of war in the lives of our own soldiers, not in dollars, not in casualties, and certainly not in lives of those humans that we call ‘enemy,’ ” he added.

Jun Ho Choi, a Rackham student who also works on building bi-pedal robots shares Collins’s apprehension about robots like SWORDS.

“This may be a positive way to improve the military, but I do not believe this is a positive way to improve our lives because I am worried about people becoming less serious about war since robots are fighting. We might end up having war every day,”