Today's military robots are ugly little buggers. The unmanned ground vehicles that assist our troops in Afghanistan typically look like miniature tanks, with nary a human feature to their credit. They're certainly not what The Terminator and Short Circuit taught us to expect when we hear the term robo-soldiers. ¶ But rest assured, robots that resemble their flesh-and-blood creators are on their way to the world's battlefields. According to a 2004 Darpa survey, US military officers believe that human-oid robots will begin filling out infantry units as early as 2025. Those android grunts will likely be descendants of Petman, a bipedal Boston Dynamics robot funded by Darpa that walks more gracefully than C-3PO.
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