WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF
As drones and robotics advance war is becoming an increasingly robotic and autonomous affair.
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Humanoid robots are already building datacenters, running marathons, and assembling cars – so it was probably only a matter of time before they ended up fighting on the frontlines along their more motorised counterparts. In a recent interview with Time, Mike LeBlanc, a combat veteran and co-founder of the robotics firm Foundation, revealed his company has already sent humanoid robots to the war-torn battlefields of Ukraine.
Back in February, Foundation sent two Phantom Mk-I units for frontline reconnaissance duty, Leblanc shared. Though the Mk-I platform is already deployed for trials in factories around the world, this would seem to mark the first deployment of a humanoid robot to the frontlines of the Ukraine-Russia war – or, as far as we can tell, any theater of combat.
“We think there’s a moral imperative to put these robots into war instead of soldiers,” LeBlanc told Time. His goal is to eventually build Phantom into a robot that can use “any kind of weapon that a human can,” like the eponymous killer robots in the “Terminator” movies.
We could evidently see that reality play out sooner rather than later. As the magazine observed in a February visit to a Foundation facility in San Francisco, the Mk-I is already capable of wielding revolvers, semi-automatic pistols, shotguns, and a dummy M-16 rifle.
If the company does make a fully-functional humanoid soldier bot, the eastern-front in the Ukraine-Russo war is as likely a place as any for them to end up, since its non-humanoid brethren have already seen significant combat there.
According to fresh reporting from Ukraine state news agency United24, the country has initiated 7,495 robotics operations in January alone. Though the majority of them are logistical – delivering weapons, ammo, and food to ground troops, for example – others bear Kalashnikov machine guns and explosives. Dramatic footage earlier this year showed Russian soldiers surrendering to an armed Ukrainian bot.
Russia has also embraced robotics for various battlefield tasks, though it has yet to deploy any humanoid units.
Beyond Ukraine, Foundation is also in “very close contact” with the Department of Homeland Security about patrol-bots for the US-Mexico border. Whether we’ll ever see that come to pass remains to be seen, but the fact that it’s possible just about says it all.
