Issues of Autonomous Robots Employed in Combat

The recent upsurge in interest in autonomous robots for combat applications has focused considerable attention on several of the obvious technical issues (e.g, target recognition, autonomous navigation, route planning). However, several technical issues exist which remain unapproached and, in some cases, even unacknowledged by the robotics community. This paper explores three such issues: (1) robot fault tolerance, (2) robot security and (3) multi-robot coordination. These issues are discussed in terms of the technology limitations and the research issues associated with those limitations. A common message which occurs several times during this discussion denotes the importance in modular implementation and well defined interfaces between subsystems in the development of autonomous combat robots.