This story lands in today's "very cool, yet very scary" category - South Korea develops a machine-gun equipped robotic sentry. The sentry robot is equipped with two cameras, one for day-time and one for infrared night vision, zooming capabilities, a speaker for notifying the intruder of inpending death, sophisticated pattern recognition to detect the difference between humans and trees, and a 5.56mm machine-gun.
The robots, co-developed between Samsung and Korea University, are expected to sell for $200,000 USD and will be available late in 2007. The South Korean government plans to deploy these friendly reminders on the border between South and North Korea, to further ease relations between the countries. Or, maybe it's the other way around.
You can also see more pictures and video of the robot on this roughly translated page. This line especially caught my attention: " ... the person the form recognition equipment to analyze the shedding of blood and a feature of the mobile object." Let's just hope that Google was especially bad at translating today.
I imagine that all of the World's Evil Leaders with secret Bad-Guy hideouts are licking their lips. |