Last month, South Korea deployed an armed surveillance robot at a guard post within the demilitarized zone in Gangwon Province. The robot consists of an array of cameras and sensors plus a 40mm grenade launcher.

Now, let’s be clear: this robot is remote controlled. It appears to have autonomous sensing and targeting capability, but it doesn’t fire autonomously… Rather, it can be fired remotely by a human. In this respect, it’s much the same as a Predator drone or a Talon SWORDS, except that it’s stationary.

This approach is very efficient if you have a lot of static area to monitor, since many robots can be controlled by a small group of humans, with each robot only alerting its controllers if its sensors detect something relevant. Human soldiers would probably perform better at most aspects of the task, certainly, but humans are very expensive to train, equip and maintain, while each of these robots costs only $330,000.

I managed to dig up a video from 2006 of what I’m pretty sure is the same basic robot; it’s in Korean, so if anyone can translate some of the interesting stuff, please post in the comments.

If this trial proves successful, South Korea plans to deploy the robots at all guard posts along the DMZ, and possibly to some offshore islands.

VIA [ Chosun ]