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Comment by abootstrapper | Hacker News Reader

Oof. I don’t know how sad it is. Slap some guns on them and they’ll start selling. I kind of hope they stick to dancing and novelty tricks.

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Bipedal robots aren't a great match for battlefield situations because they lack the ability to do proper decision making and are very expensive.

The dogs might be more usable, but even then modern conflicts are not really based on ground war. I don't think those have any significant value over a an actual drone.

Now a fleet of tiny quad-motor drones with a few bullets? That could work in high-density urban environment an quickly render guerilla warfare impossible. This project comes to mind: https://www.darpa.mil/program/offensive-swarm-enabled-tactic...

It would be far more effective to just add machine guns to UAVs like they do on the Apache [0]. It's simple, proven and effective. There is absolutely zero need for the bullets to be delivered by a crappy quadrocopter. You can send out quadrocopters for face detection and then just shoot people with the machine gun. This reminds me of that stupid missile that shoots blades. It's completely over engineered.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=629&v=vMylpfX7_S0

While I don't disagree with you, there is a very real need to avoid collateral damage in 2020. You cannot expect support at home if your drones are murdering a bunch of kids for each "bad guy" that they eliminate.

You want to be able to kill any leader anywhere and let the organization collapse due to internal power struggles. It's more fashionable.

highly surgical strikes such as selecting one individual primary target in a room full of collateral, secondary targets

> Bipedal robots aren't a great match for battlefield situations because they lack the ability to do proper decision making and are very expensive.

Depressingly accurate. Poor kids are far cheaper.

Is this supposed to be some kind of joke? Humans have guns too and they are far faster and better marksmen than a bipedal robot.

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