Gun-toting robot may guard Korean border
According to TodayOnline : Borneo Bulletin : Yahoo!News
SEOUL (AFP) – South Korea on 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 hundreds of the robots could be deployed along the 155-mile-long (248 kilometre) demilitarised 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 kilometres (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 kilometres in daytime and one kilometre 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 dollars in government and private funds.
