Thai Robot Guard Fires At the Click Of a Mouse

By Ian Sample

NEW SCIENTIST

It's been 60 years since writer Isaac Asimov dreamed up his laws governing robot behavior. But the message still hasn't sunk in. Researchers in Thailand have developed a robot security guard that comes armed with a gun and has no qualms about whom it shoots.

Called "Roboguard," the gun-toting sentinel is designed as a cheap alternative to a human guard. It can be ordered to fire at will, or told to check first with a human via a secure Internet connection.

As they appeared in Asimov's science-fiction writings in 1940, the three laws of robotics were meant to prevent robots from harming people. Roboguard appears to have the potential to defy all three.

The machine was built by Pitikhate Sooraksa of King Mongkut's Institute of Technology in Ladkrabang, Bangkok. It consists of a handgun and a small video camera mounted on a motorized holder that can direct them automatically. "It has two modes _ manual and automatic," says Sooraksa. Using the weapon in manual mode, he can control the gun from a computer anywhere in the world. A laser pointer on top of the gun marks its current target. For automatic operation, Roboguard is fitted with infrared sensors that allow it to track people as they move. Sooraksa has protected the "fire" command with a password for when the robot is operated over the Internet. "We think the decision to fire should always be a human decision," he says. "Otherwise, it could kill people."

This doesn't reassure Kevin Warwick, a cyberneticist at the University of Reading in England, who has long warned of the dangers of robots gaining too much power over human beings. "Things can always go wrong," he says. You can never allow for all eventualities. "We need to think about introducing laws like Asimov's, but even then robots will find ways to get around them."

Other researchers were equally concerned about Roboguard. "I find this quite horrific," says Chris Czarnecki of the Center for Computational Intelligence at De Montfort University in Leicester in England. "What about time delays across the Internet when it's busy? What you'll be seeing and what the gun's pointing at will be two different things. You could end up shooting anything."

Czarnecki also suspects the robot's tracking system might be error-prone. "If the tracking's infrared, what happens when the sun comes out? It's a big source of infrared radiation."

At the moment, Roboguard is tooled up with nothing but an air gun. To test its accuracy, Sooraksa pinned balloons to the walls and took potshots at them from a computer. "It's very similar to a real gun," he says. It could easily be upgraded to a more powerful weapon such as a machine gun, he adds.

Sooraksa says Roboguard might be of interest to private companies, but sees the armed forces as a more likely buyer. "We'd like to show it to the military," he says. "It should be in good hands."

The current, static version of Roboguard could be just the start. Sooraksa hopes to develop his prototype further.

"You could make it mobile; it could be designed as a walking system," he says. "We have the technology."

http://www.moscowtimes.ru/09-Sep-2000/stories/story68.html

Posted at 4:35 p.m. PDT Friday, September 8, 2000

-- Carl Jenkins (Somewherepress@aol.com), September 08, 2000

Answers

This is what Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems
was talking about when he warned of the
new breed of computers taking over our lives.

-- spider (spider0@usa.net), September 08, 2000.

Hal is back.

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