DoDAMM's Super aEgis 2: South Korea's autonomous robot
gun turret
If there's one place you don't want to be caught wandering
around right now, it's the demilitarized zone that separates
North and South Korea. Especially since South Korean military
hardware manufacturer DoDAMM used the recent Korea Robot World
2010 expo to display its new Super aEgis 2, an automated gun
turret that can detect and lock onto human targets from
kilometers away, day or night and in any weather conditions, and
deliver some heavy firepower.
The border between North and South Korea is a pretty amazing
strip of land. Around 2.5 miles (4 km) wide, it stretches the
entire width of the Korean peninsula and it's recognized as the
most heavily fortified border in the world. Over the last 60
years, as North and South Korea have faced off in an aggressive
and frequently violated ceasefire, this Demilitarized Zone (DMZ)
has been one of the deadliest places on Earth for humans. Step
into the zone and there's hundreds of thousands of soldiers on
either side ready to put a bullet in you just for being there.
As a fascinating aside, this has also made it one of the
world's best-kept nature preserves - the complete absence of
human interference leaving a more or less pristine habitat for
all kinds of wildlife, endangered and otherwise.
The DMZ's history is full of incredible stories; the gigantic
tunnels dug by North Korean incursion forces, the tragically
doomed friendships between North and South Korean soldiers
operating in the zone, the almost unbelievable defection of a
South Korean farmer across the DMZ into North Korea. And perhaps
this history will go on to include ice-cold robotic killers.
Through military eyes, the existence of a shoot-on-sight
no-go zone several kilometers wide opens up options for some
interesting high-tech hardware, like DoDaam's Super aEgis II,
which we had a chance to look over in person at the Korea Robot
World Expo 2010.
The
Super aEgis 2 is an automated gun tower that can find and
lock on to a human-sized target in pitch darkness at a distance
of up to 1.36 miles (2.2 kilometers). It uses a 35x zoom CCD
camera with 'enhancement feature' for bad weather, in
conjunction with a dual FOV, autofocus Infra-Red sensor, to pick
out targets.
Then it brings the pain, either with a standard 12.7mm
caliber machine-gun, a 40mm automatic grenade launcher upgrade,
or whatever other weapons system you want to bolt on to it,
including surface-to-air missiles. A laser range finder helps to
calibrate aim, and a gyroscopic stabilizer unit helps correct
both the video system's aim and the direction of the guns after
recoil pushes them off-target.
Each 140 kg (308.6 lb.) unit can be rigidly mounted or put on
a moving vehicle, where the gyro stabilization would be a huge
asset. They can operate in fully autonomous mode, firing first
and asking questions later, or they can be put into a manual
mode for more human intervention. All machines communicate back
to headquarters through a LAN cable or wireless network.
There's no word about whether the Super aEgis 2 has been
deployed in the Korean DMZ in the wake of several recent
incidents that threaten to push the peninsula into full-scale,
potentially nuclear war, but Dodaam has been exporting units as
far afield as the United Arab Emirates.
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