Rossum's Children

The Iraq focused blog Al Mendhar has a new article up about the often controversial SWORDS drone based on the the Talon platform.

SWORDS isn't really a robot, he's basically just a remote control machine gun. Like a regular machine gun, he could be dangerous to innocents in the hands of an evil, foolish or inexperienced operator, but in the hands of a well trained and professional soldier he's not much of a "go crazy and take over the world" risk.

In any case, the SWORDS system has been around in various forms for a while, but up-till-now it has mainly been a discussion piece. This might indicate that there is going to be a real deployment of the system soon, or it might just be that a reporter read the wire a month after it ran. [shrug]

US plans 'robot troops' for Iraq [Almendhar.com]