Worse than a future dominated by machines is, perhaps, alone a future in which machines have the sole purpose of eliminating human beings. In Metalheadan episode of the Netflix series Black Mirrorrobot dogs mercilessly chase men to exterminate them, in a post-apocalyptic world where few survivors move cautiously in case of extreme need.
A nightmare killer machine on four ‘legs’ is recurrent. A ruthless quadruped also appears in a more recent Fox TV series, War of the Worldsinspired by HG Wells’ 1897 masterpiece.
I robot dogs, in the collective imagination, they represent an impending danger, all too real. Perhaps the best known model, manufactured by Boston Dynamicsis called Spot and in reality – as we also learned during the Italian Tech Week of 2021 – it is used for noble tasks: saving human lives, for example in places difficult to access for rescue teams.
Yet, a few years ago, it was enough for Spot to open a room door to cast a disturbing shadow even on this car that seemed ‘friendly’, reassuring. Also for its extraordinary ability to ‘dance’: the choreography to the tune of the Rolling Stones, for example, is a legendary page of the digital pop culture.
The problem isn’t necessarily Spot. If anything, they are the declinations of him. The Boston Dynamics robot dog is for the few, it sells for more than 70 thousand dollars. But on the market there are now clones at a much more accessible price. Many of these are produced in Asia. The Chinese company Unitree Robotics, for example, has been producing similar ‘specimens’ for some time at a price that is just over three thousand dollars.
And it’s just a robot dog of Unitreeon sale on AliExpress for about $ 3,400, which gave Twitter users more of a thrill, due to a video in which a miter was attached to the quadruped on the mechanical back. User Sean Chiplok posted it and it was seen by nearly four million people.
There is a copy of this video, are YouTube, published in March 2022. Given the snow on either side of what looks like a polygon, the period seems more appropriate. And anyway, always on YouTube, looking through keywords’robot’, ‘dog’ e ‘gun‘you only get the Unitree in question, which appears to be thethe only documented example of a weapon applied – in a rudimentary way – to a quadrupedal robot.
On YouTube, last March, the video was published by Alexander Atamanovthe founder of a startup called Hoversurf who intends to produce hoverbike, flying drones capable of carrying people. Also last March, on his Facebook page, Atamanov published a shot of the armed robot dog, in the same polygon as the viral video.
The robot dog who shoot repeatedly, trying to hit the targets in front of him, is not a machine on the market, in fact. It is the result of the union of the Unitree Go1 and a machine gun that could be, as many have noted, the Saiga-9. This last detail could be confirmed by the fact that, also Atamanov, published a video on YouTube in 2019 in which he shot with the Saiga-9, in a shooting area that closely resembles the one in which the dog moves. armed robot.
The quadrupedal robot is equipped with a video camera which allows you to have a subjective shotas in shooter video games. Only this is not a game. The volleys of shots start in earnest. But we do not know if there is a mechanism that allows the robot dog to fire autonomously or if the weapon – which is more likely – be controlled remotely.
Everything suggests that the author of this video is in Russia. The flag of the Russian Federation is attached to the sides of the Unitree Go1 and the head of a fox which could be the symbol of the special armed forces Spetsnaz. Also the military vehicle shown in the video is Russian: it is a BRDM-2 amphibious vehicle.
The way this robot dog is assembled looks quite amateur. In short, for now we are facing a very dangerous toy. But the idea is not new and indeed there are those who are ready to market it. Last year the company Ghost Robotics presented a machine called SPUR that offers “precise fire”, rechargeable and ‘safe’ remotely. Ghost Robotics claims that SPUR is “the future of autonomous weapons”.
And it should be remembered that some armies, the French one for example, are starting to use robot dogs in their operations. Unarmed for now, but it’s probably just a matter of time. And of opportunity.
No one, until a few months ago, could have imagined an escalation in the use of commercial drones as weapons of war. It happened in Ukrainewhere Zelensky’s army uses autonomous aircraft to locate and in many cases bomb the Russians who have invaded the country.