Robo Cop In South Korea

[wokensheep]

VIDEO OF ROBO-COP
South Korea unveils gun-toting sentry robot
AFP

September 28, 2006

SEOUL -- South Korea Thursday unveiled a high-tech, machine gun-toting sentry robot that could support its troops in detecting and killing intruders along the heavily fortified border with North Korea.

The weapons-grade robot can detect, raise the alarm, and provide suppressive fire, said Lee Jae-Hoon, deputy minister of commerce, industry, and energy. "The Intelligent Surveillance and Guard Robot has surveillance, tracking, firing, and voice recognition systems built into a single unit," he added.

Lee said that hundreds of the robots could be deployed along the 155-mile-long (248 kilometer) demilitarized zone bisecting the two Koreas as well as along the country's coastline and at military airfields.

With modifications, they could also be used to guard civilian installations such as airports, power stations, and oil pipelines. However, the government has made no decision yet on whether to deploy the robots along the world's last Cold War frontier.

Equipped with visual and infra-red detection capabilities, the sentry robot can spot moving objects up to four kilometers (2.5 miles) away during the day and half that distance at night.

Via "pattern recognition," it can distinguish between humans, cars, or trees at two kilometers in daytime and one kilometer at night. Suppressive fire can be provided by a machine gun on top.

The robot was developed by a group of four institutions including Samsung Techwin Co. and Korea University over three years at a cost of some $10 million in government and private funds. Each costs 190 million won ($200,000) and the developers expect to sell around $200 million worth of them when they go on sale late next year.

"The robot will also help cope with the expected decrease in conscripts in the coming years," Lee told journalists.

South Korea has a largely conscript military of 650,000 against Pyongyang's 1.2 million-strong forces, but a falling birth rate means that Seoul will struggle in the future to maintain troop numbers.

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S Korea robots 'to patrol border'
The border between North and South Korea
The heavily fortified border has been in place since the 1950s
South Korea's defence ministry is considering deploying robots armed with guns along its border with North Korea.

The robots are designed to strengthen surveillance, ministry spokesman Shin Hyun-don told reporters.

The 4km (2.5 mile) wide Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) separating North and South Korea is already the most heavily fortified border in the world.

Hundreds of thousands of troops patrol the frontier, which has been closed since the Korean War ended in 1953.

The defence ministry said on Friday that it would complete a feasibility study of the planned system by the end of 2005, and the robots could be in operation as early as 2011.

"If the surveillance system by robots is effective, we may withdraw part of our troops away from the border," a ministry official told the Associated Press news agency.


KOREAN BORDER
240 km long and 4km wide, the DMZ takes up about 0.5% of Korean peninsula
N Korea has 1.1 million man army along the border. S Korea and US forces total more than 700,000

According to officials quoted in the Korea Times newspaper, the cost of the project could run to $1.9bn.

South Korea has been anxious to improve security on the border with the North since three holes were discovered in the frontier fence in October.

At first Seoul feared that North Korean agents had infiltrated the South, but officials eventually concluded that the holes had been made by a South Korean civilian defecting to the North.

This is not the first time South Korea has deployed robots to help its defensive capabilities.

Two rifle-equipped robots were reportedly deployed with South Korean troops in Iraq.

[tsoldrin]

This is the worst possible news. I'd imagine they're already drawing up plans to use something like this for policing home populations. They have finally solved the problem of the possibility of soldiers refusing to open fire on their own people. :(

[standvast]

Quote:This is the worst possible news. I'd imagine they're already drawing up plans to use something like this for policing home populations. They have finally solved the problem of the possibility of soldiers refusing to open fire on their own people.:(

Agreed, reasoning and / or compassion are not part of the make-up of ED209 or this guy.

[drew hempel]

Yeah this is really creepy -- especially the part about the people defecting TO North Korea -- that just shows how evil these robots are! haha.