The “Intelligent Surveillance and & Security Guard Robot” or “Samsung SGR-A1” is an autonomous guarding robot designed to protect the South Korean border. It was developed by Samsung Techwin, a subsidiary of the Samsung Group. The robot can detect intruders from North Korea, raise the alarm, and, if necessary, fire at them with its top mounted machine gun. It is the first robot to have surveillance, tracking, firing, and voice recognition systems built into a single unit.

“Until now, technology allowed these robots to conduct monitoring functions only. But now our robots can detect suspicious moving objects, literally go after them, and can even fire at them!”
Sang-Il Han, principal research engineer at Samsung Techwin

The system uses its voice recognition to identify approaching persons. If the intruder is unable to provide the necessary access code when at a distance of ten meters, the Samsung SGR-A1 can either sound an alarm, fire rubber bullets or make use of its Daewoo K3 5,56mm machine gun which has a shooting rate of up to 1000 bullets per minute. It is equipped with both optical and infrared sensors to identify and follow targets from 4 km in daylight and around half that distance at night. It can differentiate between men, animals, vehicles and the environment. A rocket launcher may be used as secondary weapon.

South Korea’s northern border is the most heavily militarized zone in the world, and the southern government has poured millions of dollars into automated military technology. Hundreds of these robots could be deployed along the 248 km long zone dividing the two Koreas as well as along the country’s coastline and at military airfields. Prototypes have been tested in 2007, and the South Korean government plans to buy 1000 of these robots at US$200.000 each.

Experts criticize the loss of human control over force of arms. They expect the rate of wrong decisions of the software to be higher than a human’s. There may also be a way to manipulate the robot.

When I first found information about this robot around a year ago, there was plenty of stuff written on the official Samsung Techwin website, on Wikipedia and so on. Now it is not mentioned at all at the Techwin site, the Wikipedia article is gone, … Do they want to hide their invention?

Links:

• Demonstration Video of the SGR-A1
• Official Samsung Techwin website (removed)
• vnunet.com report
• German wikipedia article

Here is another interesting Security Robot, and it shows quite good why there shouldn’t be any automated fighting robots I think: