Dallas police used a robot to kill a man

Today in Dallas (USA), for the first time in the history of robotics, a civilian robot was used to kill a criminal .

Such operations are often carried out in war. For the destruction of the enemy used unmanned aerial vehicles , self - propelled units with remote control , border machine guns with night vision systems and radars and other various automatic systems.
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But in civilian life, a robot killing a person until July 8, 2016 was found only in science fiction films.

Dallas police performed the surgery at 2:30 in the morning. A bombardment robot with a manipulator arm destroyed an armed criminal. On the eve, he arranged a shooting during a mass demonstration in Dallas, shooting five policemen, wounding seven policemen and two civilians.

For the US police, yesterday brought the greatest casualties to the rank and file since September 11, 2001.

Micah X. Johnson, 25, a US Army reservist and resident of the Dallas suburb, staged a carnage yesterday during a peaceful urban demonstration against the use of weapons by the police during recent incidents . About 800 people took part in the peace march, they were accompanied by about 100 police officers, when around 20:55 shooting began.

Investigators believe that Johnson was in an informal fighting club and repeatedly practiced target shooting. This explains such a high accuracy of hits.

The negotiator talked with the criminal, he says that Johnson expressed displeasure with the “white people” and the latest cases of violence, when the police often shot black suspects.

Johnson hid in the garage, and the police had little choice but to use the robot. For this, they used a sapper robot, which is available in the police arsenal. Usually it is designed for bomb disposal. Using a manipulator arm, the robot drives up to the object (bomb, backpack, suspicious package), grabs it and takes it to a safe place. Similar sapper robots have been used in the army for over ten years.


Military robot sapper MARCbot IV with a video camera to search for bombs, 2005

In this case, the machine used for the opposite purpose. In the arm-manipulator specially placed the bomb, and the robot was sent to the location of the offender. There the bomb detonated. Now the police conducts a thorough inspection of the scene in search of evidence.

This is not the first time that the police use autonomous robotic sappers for other purposes. For example, in April 2015, the San Jose police dissuaded a person from suicide: they managed to talk to him when the robot brought him a pizza and a telephone .

But military experts say that today's murder in Dallas is really the first time that the police used a robot to kill. One of the experts recalls that the American army in Iraq used the sapper model MARCbot in this way. The delivery of bombs by drones and ground robots was attempted by the Islamic resistance militia as well.

Existing legislation does not prohibit the use of robots during police operations. It can be assumed that after this incident this practice will continue. A variety of robots, including multikopter, are suitable for delivering a bomb for the purpose of detonation. If civilians are near the criminal, then you can use small arms that are aimed at the target through a machine vision system.


Terminator Computer Vision System

Currently, there is no reason to activate offline mode for robots. The decision to use a weapon always remains with the person.

Another thing is that you can manually assign a target for destruction, specifying the offender, and the robot will pick up to him - and destroy. Perhaps, in the distant future, laws will make it possible to set a target for destruction even if the perpetrator is not in sight. For example, only on his biometric information.