"What would your design be for a killer robot?" Topic

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I think I would go for legs, six of them. Perhaps with some system for crossing water. Perhaps a hover system would be a better idea.
Armament a 40 to 60mm light cannon and an anti-personnel system, perhaps a laser if we have progressed that far (or microwave?).
Sensors; sound, thermal, optical and radar.
Power system, would have to be nuclear.

Small, comes in huge swarms, fast enough to close in rapidly, able to climb walls and enter buildings from unexpected angles. Armed with a modular weapon with options like grenade launcher, gun or AT weapon. Small explosive charge for suicide room clearing or to prevent attackers from getting too close. Also has sharp implements for close combat or to prevent the enemy from "harvesting" them.

Limited battery life, battery also acts as a dead-man's handle. When juice runs out, device automatically self destructs.

Geofencing with networked target recognition. Can be set to find and eliminate certain targets or to "exterminate everything in that area." and anything in between.

Small cheap and numerous.
Spider like and foot long or so bodies armed with a pistol.
and
Small flying ones with a small explosive charge. They fly at the enemy and go bang on impact. Like slow explosive bullets. Maybe with an option to deploy several out a 40mm grenade.

I think it's a mistake to try and make one design does everything. Complicated means expensive and error prone.
Make them specialised, throw away and if they can't get through a door or across a river then you work round that or send people in with them. People are flexible.
I see early killer robots as another arm in combined arms rather than a total replacement for people.

If this is actually a science fiction thread then "colony" drones. How you build vast quantities of AI controlled small machines which somehow null gravity, armed with teeny death ray projectors… I dunno. But 10,000 of those things would have spoiled isis' fun pretty quick.

One that can climb stairs!

Tally Ho!

When you grab the badly beaten hero with your hydraulic fingers, the highest priority in your programming is that you do NOT let go.

You do NOT throw him toward the weapon he dropped earlier. You do NOT drop him off a precipice that will probably kill him. You do NOT think that stalking him as he tries to recover from his twisted leg will look "sinister".

You hang on. You swing him through walls, you tighten your choke hold, you use your other appendages to whack him around a little bit tighter. But once you got a grip, the only option your AI suggests is to close it up a little more. You don't even "adjust for a better hold".

You. Hang. On.

stealth would be better
they 'just want to be your friend'

blinky
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The stay Puff Marshallow man.

Gnats/fruit flies.

You could make them so that they deliver a sting, or have them deposit poison in someone's food.

Dan

I would use the same basic design as the sex bots, just a simple software upgrade.

I saw a video of a robot with a single leg, moved like it was on a pogo stick. Apparently some university was working on it. Strap some gyros on it to keep the platform steady and attach a gun or two. It's a fast moving target that hops instead of moving in a straight line (include flips and bounces). Sure, mud would stop it dead, but it would rock in a city and on dry land.

I think the main design features of a killer robot would be speed and boom power. Making them slow and well armored, while cool, wouldn't get the job done.

Its called a Trident missile….!

I'm with WeeSparky on this one.

I would build a fully-functional sex robot, designed to look like whatever media star caught my eye, but with the body 'enhanced' in whatever way I found most pleasing.

Afterwards I would hand it a pointed stick and tell it to go kill something.

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Drones. Just big enough to carry whatever ordinance they needed. Cheap (ha ha, yes I know that is optimistic), and launched in numbers. Homing in on either designated targets, or programmed to shoot anything moving or recognisable as a target within an area.

An explosive that looks exactly like a twenty dollar bill lying on the sidewalk.

Think insectoid grenade…….flies, crawls, booms.

Some sort of doppelganger machine that replaces household items, laptops, your favorite chair, the toilet. Goes all spiky death machine, at the most inconvenient moment ;-)

Nano-bots that swarm and take thing apart at the molecular level.

Anything you guys are thinking of is at least two generations behind what the smart guys at Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, BAE, Thales etc are already working on.

More advanced stuff than you are discussing is classified but has already been out on trials. If you think Elon Musk was kidding, you haven't seen anything yet.

I suspect it's already too late to put the killer robot genie back in the bottle.

nano bots and a-grav drones with death rays are at least two generations behind what's already being worked on.
WTF would that be then?

I'm not sure we have bots down at the nano scale yet, the engineering isn't there.

But I AM certain we have bots at the millimeter scale and you can buy a COTS centimeter-scale bot with FPV for $35. USD

For immediate deployment? I'd go with that $35 USD FPV quad, armed with a 40mm HEDP grenade. Fly to target and boom.

One issue with nanobots is that they're so light that they will be blown on the wind. Nanobots will basically be chemical weapons, just nastier ones.

Yeah bang for buck I'm not sure nanobots beat a numerically smaller swarm of flying grenade launchers any time soon…

Even declassified, we know that swarm AI for flyers is being worked on, and that's pretty essential to any drone-centric military.