Kommersant-Vlast: “Vladimir Putin visits a robot”
At last he came.
The prime minister visited Izhevsk, a city of weapons manufacturers, last week. Among the designers' achievements, he was shown a weapon which has exercised the minds of many Russian citizens for four years now, the DUM fighting robot. That brainchild of the Spetstekhnika Research and Production Centre Progress weighs about a ton and is the size of half an Oka car, it is armed with a 7.62 PKT machine-gun and has a range of up to 1.5 km. A prototype is being tested.
The question as to whether Russia planned to use huge human-like fighting robots to defend its borders was the second most frequently asked question on July 6, 2006 when Vladimir Putin went live on the Internet in an interactive programme. At the time, 26,602 questions were asked about the future of fighting robots. No questions about the robots were asked during his live phone-in, so Kommersant's special correspondent Andrei Kolesnikov had to ask the question. Replying to Kolesnikov, Vladimir Putin confirmed that there were plans to use combat robots: "Yes, we will use the latest technology. They are already being deployed in the south of the country." He did not elaborate and merely said that "for now we pin our hopes on humans."
It has now transpired that a fighting robot has been built. In fact, the designers even took notice of Vladimir Putin's thesis that our main hopes are still living humans: in the DUM combat robotised system the firing is controlled over the radio by a human. Thus, the Russian fighting robot has a living human face and its designers have thus neatly sidestepped a host of problems faced by their foreign colleagues who try to make do without natural intelligence on the battlefield. And then there is the guarantee that the Russian robots will not turn on their creators: the Russian Army has effective methods of controlling its human fighters.
