As technology progresses and robotics becomes more and more sophisticated, robots should not only seek but also know how to hide.
At Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Laboratories located at Cherry Hill in New Jersey, huge progress has been made in covert robotics where the robots are developed to be situationally aware. According to Brian Satterfield, Lockheed Martin’s Lead Engineer, they include laser scanners for mapping out their environments in three- dimension and also have robotic ears to hear footsteps and find out, from which direction the footsteps are coming in. Currently, the prototype of the robot can hide from guards in known positions, work to avoid the sentries in strange locations, shun well lit areas, and steer clear of circumstances, from which escape is impossible.
Satterfield has stated that the robot does not have complete theory of mind at present, but in the future they may be intelligent enough to have it. According to him, there were only some fundamental limits that would stop or thwart robots from ultimately conducting covert missions and averting detection by human beings. The US Army had announced that it was interested in a hiding robot to be used for persistent surveillance and there were also many more demands for these kinds of robots. Other than Lockheed Martin, TiaLinx has also developed a new robot for surveillance that could scan across concrete walls to detect human breathing. It uses biorhythmic patterns to sense people who are standing motionlessly. These kinds of robots help in keeping the ongoing debate on whether it was good or bad to teach robots to dissemble and deceive, alive.
Source: http://www.lockheedmartin.com/