NanoTech-Electronics

Robots in the military are no longer the stuff of science fiction. They have left the movie screen and entered the battlefield. Washington University in St. Louis's Doug Few and Bill Smart are on the cutting edge of this new wave of technology. Few and Smart report that the military goal is to have approximately 30% of the army be robotic forces by somewhere around 2020. Of course, this isn't robotic soldiers from movies like "Star Wars" and "I, Robot."

"When the military says 'robot' they mean everything from self-driving trucks up to what you would think of as a robot. You would more accurately call them autonomous systems rather than robots," says Smart, Ph.D., WUSTL assistant professor of computer science and engineering.

All of the army's robotic force is teleoperated, meaning that there is someone operating the robot from a remote location, perhaps with a joystick and a computer screen. While this may seem like a caveat in plans to add robots to the military, it is actually very important to keep humans involved in the robotic operations.

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